The rule-breaking Cat in the hat, now part of the reading establishment, changed the way children are taught to read.
ERIN ANDERSEN/Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, April 14, 2007 7:00 pm
The sun did not shine
It was too wet to play.
So they sat in the house
All that cold, cold wet day.
Sally and her brother
were bored and so blue.
Not unlike Dick, Jane
and their dog, Spot, too.
But then in waltzed a cat
A cat in a hat,
as a matter of fact,
Changing the world,
just like that.
— with thanks to Dr. Seuss
“The Cat in the Hat” turned 50 last month.
First published in 1957, this mischievous cat took the literary world by storm.
The kiddies loved him.
So did their parents.
But schoolteachers did not:
That cat!
He’s naughty!
Subversive!
And downright anarchistic, they cried.
A rule breaker with no shame, who teaches kids the same.
No amount of sing-songy rhymes and silly words will overcome this feisty feline's moral shortcomings, educators proclaimed.
But they were wrong.
Oh, so very very wrong.
Thanks to the Cat, Dr. Seuss (a.k.a. Theodor Geisel) became a household name, and a full-time writer of children’s books.
“He put into place the conventions we take for granted today, one of which is that learning to read should be fun. It shouldn't be a chore,” said Philip Nel, associate professor of English at Kansas State University and author of the newly published book “The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats.”
The Cat actually changed the way children are taught to read — helping phonics prevail over rote memorization in the nation’s reading wars.
Some, like American Library Association’s Kathleen Horning, go so far as to theorize The Cat influenced America’s culture, granting baby boomers permission to challenge authority.
The Cat is an American icon, Nel said in a telephone interview from his home.
“He is instantly recognizable. … He just shows up everywhere.”
On book jackets. On dishes. On postage stamps. In political cartoons. Statues, toys and giant parade balloons. And even as an amusement park ride.
“The Cat in the Hat” has been translated into languages around the world — into Braille, Spanish, French, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Afrikaans, Italian, (“Il Gatto col Cappello”), German (“Der Kater mit Hut”) and Latin (“Cattus Petasatus”).
The Cat in his red and white stovepipe hat is a universal symbol for fun, said Wendy Bonaiuto, principal at Lincoln’s Randolph Elementary School.
More specifically, “that reading is fun — regardless of your age,” she said.
“You can walk up to anybody, and they are familiar with ‘The Cat in the Hat,’” said Carol Hughes, media specialist at Rousseau Elementary School.
Adds Pat Etherton, who portrays The Cat in the Hat every year for Read Across America Day in Lincoln, “I have never found a first-grader, second-grader or even an adult that doesn’t like Dr. Seuss.”
But this story of The Cat and his creator Seuss is not one of luck, happenstance or whimsy.
And while today people call it pure genius, the fact is, creating the book drove Seuss to such frustration that it almost never happened.
Seuss had four children’s books to his name before “The Cat in the Hat.” “And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street” was published in 1937, followed by “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins” (1938), “The King’s Stilts” (1939) and “Horton Hatches the Egg” (1940).
But Seuss was best known for his advertisement characters, like Standard Oil’s Flit and his political cartoons such as Private SNAFU (Situation Normal … All Fouled Up).
In the 1950s, the nation’s reading wars were heating up. Students’ reading scores were nothing to be proud of, and increasingly, American writers and educators questioned the value of “antiseptic,” “boring” and “pointless” readers such as the Dick and Jane books.
“There was a great disagreement about what we are always disagreeing about — how do children learn to read best,” said Anita Silvey, Seuss fan and author of “100 Best Books for Children.”
At the time, the prevailing reading series like Dick and Jane were sight-based basal readers that operated under the premise that “if children look at words enough, they will basically learn to read them — if the same words are repeated over and over again,” Silvey said in a phone interview from her Boston, Mass., home.
Clearly, it worked to some degree. Even today, some argue Dick and Jane have a spot in the curricula for early readers.
But was it an effective way to teach reading? Was it the best way to teach reading?
Many people answered no to both questions. In the mid-1950s, Rudolf Flesch wrote “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” followed by journalist John Hersey’s controversial piece in Life magazine, “Why Do Students Bog Down on the First R?”
Hersey contended the fault was not with the teachers but with the unchallenging and dull reading material used in basal readers such as Dick and Jane.
Pages upon pages of “Look Jane look,” “See Dick run,” See Spot run,” “See Dick, Jane and Spot run” were hardly can't-put-down or can't-wait-to-get-to-the-end sort of books, said Horning, president of the ALA's Association of Library Services to Children and director of the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hersey said the characters in Dick and Jane-type primers “were abnormally courteous and unnaturally clean.”
“I always thought there must be a town somewhere where people lived like that,” Horning said.
Dick and Jane readers were not about plot or story.
“Dick and Jane did nothing,” Silvey said. “They weren’t supposed to.”
Dick and Jane were about repetition, memorization and recognition.
In his Life article, Hersey suggested school primers would be well served by illustrations such as those created by Seuss.
“Ironically, it was not his illustrations, but his words that had the impact,” Horning said of Seuss and “The Cat in the Hat.” “It was an entertaining and compelling story that new readers could read.”
William Spaulding, Seuss’ old Army buddy and director of Houghton Mifflin’s educational division, challenged Seuss to write a reading book, using only words that first- and second-grade beginning readers should know.
Seuss thought he “could knock it off in a week or so,” Nel said. “It took a year and a half.”
Seuss reportedly said the experience was like “being lost with a witch in a tunnel of love.”
He almost gave up out of frustration, Nel said.
It was that list of simple words that had Seuss so stymied. They did not inspire story line or prose. According to legend, Seuss ultimately decided he would find two words that rhymed and make it the book’s title.
Lucky for the world those words were “cat” and “hat.”
He then proceeded to doodle a cat in a stovepipe hat. And the rest of the book just fell into place, Nel said.
“The Cat in the Hat” uses 236 words.
“The brilliance of ‘The Cat in the Hat’ is in his vocabulary and in creating such a great story with so few words. And it is so funny,” Horning said. “He set a high standard for other easy reader books.”
Fifty years later, literary historians, teachers and adults all recognize the phenomenal impact of Seuss and his Cat, said Hughes of Rousseau Elementary.
The Cat gave phonics its wings. It ultimately offered proof that, when children learn word group sounds like “an” and “at” and “ish” and then sound them out when different consonants like “c” and “h” and “d” and “v” are put in front, reading comes more naturally.
Even back in 1956, Seuss knew he was on the cusp of something highly controversial with “The Cat in the Hat,” Nel said.
In “The Annotated Cat” is a copy of a letter Seuss sent to his publisher at Random House on June 11, 1956.
“Don’t ever show this letter to anyone, but I’ve got a hunch … (very immodest) … Namely, according to Houghton-Mifflin, who will be releasing my First Grade Reader to schools in Jan. or Feb., we’ve got a possibility of making a tremendous noise in the noisy discussion of Why Johnny Can’t Read.”
“… Too early to tell yet, so you and I should just watch and wait, but if Houghton Mifflin is right, we’ll be plumb in the middle of a great educational controversy.”
Seuss was right, of course.
But not in the way he predicted.
While the textbook/school version of “The Cat in the Hat” was published and sold by Houghton Mifflin, Random House (with whom Seuss had a contract) retained the rights to sell the book to the general public.
“The school edition did not sell as well as the trade edition,” Nel wrote in “The Annotated Cat.” “Because, according to Seuss, educators considered the book too subversive.”
Dick and Jane devotees in the school system considered “The Cat in the Hat” too “fresh” and “irreverent.”
But the Random House version, which was more colorful than its textbook counterpart, flew off the shelves. Within one month of its March 1, 1957, release, the publishing house had the book in its second printing. By the following spring, more than 200,000 copies had been sold. And by the end of 1960, nearly one million copies of “The Cat in the Hat” were in the hands of children and their families, Nel said.
Youngsters were picking up this book and saying, “I can read it. I finished a whole book on my own,” Silvey said. “It gave children the competence to follow a story from beginning to end on their own.”
And it spawned a whole generation of “beginning readers” and “I can read” books such as “Hop on Pop,” “Danny and the Dinosaur,” “Little Bear” and “The Berenstain Bears,” Nel said.
“These stories began to convince everyone that you could teach reading basics without that simple, boring dialog of Dick and Jane,” Silvey said. “By the 1960s most publishers started to work this into their reading series. They realized that reading comes down to two things: the mechanics and the motivation. There has to be a reason why kids want to learn this most difficult struggle.
“Dr. Seuss gave them that motivation. Kids want to hang out with the Cat in the Hat,” she said.
And Seuss showed education decision makers that children deserve respect in their books.
“With Dick and Jane you have this sense it is written for idiots. It is condescending to you,” Nel said. “Real people don’t talk that way — ‘see the ball’ — unless you are talking to someone who is cognitively impaired.
“Children are not cognitively impaired. They know fewer words, and shorter words, but they are not idiots,” he said. “‘The Cat in the Hat’ and Seuss respect children’s intelligence.”
And at the same time, that Cat — an American icon — gives us a safe, fun and understandable way to look at politics, love and life.
“Everybody recognizes that hat,” Nel said.
“One way to measure Seuss’ influence is to look at all the different people who have embraced or used ‘The Cat in the Hat,’” Nel said.
He shows up in political cartoons, depicted as both liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat, conniving and innocent, brilliant and foolhardy.
He shows up in satire, as well as on inflatable pillows, bedsheets and alarm clocks.
He has influenced many of today’s authors, artists, actors and producers, Nel said. LL Cool J made it cool to wear Cat in the Hat-like hats. Tim Burton uses his influence in movies. And many a naughty kid who has been sent to the principal’s office finds a kindred soul in that Cat, Nel said.
The Cat and his hat are corporate symbols (for Random House) and an icon for anarchy.
Rather than outgrow him, teens, young adults and grandparents continue to embrace him — his sequels (“The Cat in the Hat Comes Back,” “The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library” “The Cat in the Hat Songbook,” “Cooking With the Cat” and many more); his toys, his movies, his attire.
“People who buy his hats are probably college students nostalgic for their own childhoods,” Horning said.
“A lot of kids who are now adults did learn that reading could be pleasurable with ‘The Cat in the Hat.’”
And so it is without embarrassment or self-consciousness that Americans from all walks of life don that familiar red and white hat and people smile with their memories.
When Lincoln’s Pat Etherton wears her Cat in the Hat costume, kids come out of nowhere to hug her. Adults stop to recall their favorite Seuss stories and characters.
Even U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer donned that familiar hat and read books to children during Read Across America Day a few years back.
“When a Supreme Court justice wears that hat and nobody looks askance, that is a tribute to Dr. Seuss. And that is a good thing,” Nel said.
Every summer for the past decade, Darla Reinwald has taught the ever-so-popular “Seuss on the Loose,” a weeklong summer enrichment class for Bright Lights. Children make Cat in the Hat hats, read stories, write their own rhymes and use Seussical themes to learn about math, science, social skills and the environment.
Even as students reach their middle school years, Lincoln teachers use Seuss and that Cat to teach broader life lessons about tolerance, responsibility and discrimination.
So 50 years from now, will we still be celebrating that remarkable cat?
Silvey is skeptical.
“Very few children’s books make it past 100,” she said.
That’s because culture changes and childhood changes. What was important in 1957 may be irrelevant in 2057.
Still …
“If any children’s book writer from this century is being read 100 years from now,” Silvey said. “I would put my money on Dr. Seuss.”
Reach Erin Andersen at 473-7217 or eandersen@journalstar.com.