It’s the 1990s. Kids in classrooms stare upon these cursed die-cut visages on the wall. Everything has a face. Everything must be smiling. And all with the same tedious expression – Carson-Dellosa face.
With a heaping spoonful of nostalgia, let’s revisit Carson-Dellosa style and why these images irritate.
Patti Carson, Janet Dellosa, and Steve Carson established the Carson-Dellosa Publishing Company in 1976. The company creates bright, basic, and safe school supplies and decorations. They’re still around.
I can’t speak to the 1980s, but 90s kids like me will likely remember these die-cut shapes with plastered on smiles just littered across school classrooms and hallways.
Here are the common elements of a Carson-Dellosa face:
- Pupils at the bottom of an oblong eye turn outwards or sit at the bottom
- The tops of the oblong eye turn inwards at the top
- Two small lined eyebrows give a distinct expression of constant surprise (like my eyebrows in the early 2000s)
- A shiny pink oval nose
- An unnaturally rounded smile, complete with little half-circles for cheeks
- Frequently two spots of rounded blush on the cheeks appear
I swear that smile does not reach the eyes.
But I wondered if maybe there’s something more to these images outside of my initial visceral millennial reaction.
For example, I remember these bears rubbing me the wrong way. They’re just sickly sweet, simpering, and so bland they actually kind of end up offending me. There’s no harm in these pictures, not really, but they spark a grimace at best. Why?
Inanimate objects also wore this eager face. As if teachers declared that every god damn thing shall have the same Carson-Dellosa face. And innocuous things like seasons, holidays, shapes seemed to be especially popular. Imagine grandma’s seasonal sweater come to life.
Another commonality is Carson-Dellosa style includes lots of waving and open body language. Frequently with unintentionally funny results.
The style reeks of the zany and gendered 90s despite the clear effort to try and be as bright but bland and inoffensive as possible. These snowmen and spiders must have gendered aspects. Inexplicably, in the form of a bowtie and top hat. But as far as 90s sexual dimorphism portrayals go…fine.
But they also reflect, in my opinion, a shifting pedagogy.
In the 1970s States began to ban corporal punishment in schools. This ramped up in the 1990s. (New Jersey, ahead of the curve, banned it in 1867.) Not that the absence of a law means all schools were engaging in it, but enough did.
However, this issue isn’t regulated to the past. Corporal punishment is still legal in many states in the United States. Yes, likely where you think. Including my home state, Texas, where my eyebrows and I witnessed it in the early 2000s. In 2006 as a result of corporal punishment in the United States, 10,000-20,000 children requested or required medical attention. Elizabeth T. Gershoff and Sarah A. Font estimated in 2016 that 160,000 children endured corporal punishment. Often with the most vulnerable children targeted.
Let’s step back to the 1990s. Positive affirmation and an emphasis on kindness instead of punishment in the classroom became more common in pedagogy. And I think these Carson-Dellosa die-cuts embody that shift in the nineties classroom.
“Be The Best You Can Be!” seems like good attainable advice. Better than being smacked around surely. A part of me wonders if these silly little images say more about how teachers wished they were treated as children. A small way to break the cycle.
Take this image for example. Even if the logic of a book reading another book with their mouse friend is perplexing, this book has great self-esteem and will let you know about it. While these images are deeply uncool and amazingly cringeworthy, they encouraged children to be confident and kind.
Carson-Dellosa style also uses familiar images without explaining what is going on – which I deeply respect.
Another thing to note is there’s a shift to celebrating and highlighting diversity.
To a modern audience these images might feel forced and engaging heavily in tokenism. But it could also be argued they helped children see diversity and normalized it.
Carson-Dellosa style often portrays a token wheelchair user or children using a mobility device. (I remember crutches but can’t find an image.) Only years before Carson-Dellosa’s founding children with disabilities receiving a public education were the outlier.
In 1970, U.S. schools educated only one in five children with disabilities, and many states had laws excluding certain students, including children who were deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed, or had an intellectual disability.
In 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act to attempt to enact equal access to public education for children with disabilities. And George H. W. Bush signed the American Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 enforcing public spaces to have accessibility modifications. Again, this is not a in the past issue. But the Carson-Dellosa style in the 1990s showed a clear desire to include people with disabilities, even if it can read as clunky today.
So, yes, these pictures are displeasing. They’re creepy, saccharine, overly ‘good’ and overly trusting of traditions and authority. Too safe and rarely challenging.
But, mass produced images cultures create say something about the time and place of production. And for me anyway they remind me of the idealized harmonious world we were supposed to live in. False promises of a more kind world. So maybe that’s why they irritate me.
Or maybe they’re just irritatingly ugly.
Read More:
A Brief History of the Disability Rights Movement
