ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a discourse analysis of selected narratives from the Catholic revisions of the Dick and Jane textbooks for first graders. In early modern Western culture, the first formal textbooks were compiled for identifiably ideological purposes, specifically those of church and polity. The relationship between literacy, education, and religion is a historically long-standing one that predates the reformation. The addition of frames/narratives that would express an identifiably Catholic ethos required the editorial deletion of some of the stories from the secular version, and minor augmentation of others. The themes of the Catholic possible world of Dick and Jane, then, are established largely through linguistic and semiotic devices that match those used in the secular narratives. Literacy instruction can thus be a form of ideological practice not just in terms of the overt values and surface-level messages about the world that curricular text conveys. Textbooks and reading practices, then, have a long history in the church and in schooling.
