User:Amire80/Bob Dixon (writer)

Bob Dixon (1931–2008) was an English writer, poet, teacher. As an education researcher, Dixon studied products aimed at children, such as toys, games, puzzles and children's fiction with regard to the ideas and concepts they conveyed.

Born in Spennymoor, County Durham on 29th November 1931. His mother was unmarried, and he was brought up by his grandparents, thinking they were his parents. He missed a considerable amount of schooling because of tuberculosis. He failed the eleven plus school test, but two years later gained a place at grammar school through ‘occasional admittance’ exam, part of a drive to recruit teachers.

He graduated University of Nottinghan in 1954 with an arts degree, and did two years of National Service in the army. After this he taught at state schools for ten years, including two years at Risinghill Comprehensive School in Islington, where he moved from Southall to work for the innovative Risinghill headmaster Michael Duane, who opposed corporal punishment and school authoritarianism.

He spent two years doing educational research and teaching in Czechoslovakia before becoming a lecturer in English at Stockwell College of Education for eleven years.

In 1977 he researched and wrote Catching Them Young, a two-volume book about the promotion of stereotypes and prejudices on the basis of class, gender, race, and religion through children's fiction. He later published Now Read On: Recommended Fiction for Young People (1982). In 1992 he followed it up with Playing Them False, in which he has shown that similar messages are sent by toys, games and puzzles, and that commercial interests prime the compliance of future consumers and the mass media.

He published several volumes of poetry: Agitpoems (1985), More Agitation (1999), and Make Capitalism History: Poems and Other Communications (2006). His poetry reflected his opposition to capitalism and war.

His last, autobiographical book The Wrong was published in 2008.

He died on 4th October 2008.