The purpose of this thesis is to consider three opposing statements regarding aesthetics in our popular culture. The first statement is that the youth of this age are demolishing the old standards of aesthetic taste and are creating a nonaesthetic; the second statement is that the youth are enlarging the vision and scope of the accepted standard of aesthetic and changing its direction; the thrid statement is that the creations of the youth in our popular culture of today are neither new nor nonaesthetic, but merely a continuation of aesthetics as they are accepted. One statement will be chosen as the most valid of the three.

In this investigation, a content analysis was made with eleven lexicographical sources and three basal reading series to determine if art and art-related words were present. The analysis was made with the use of two charts, in which each was divided into eight categories of word context. The Composite Chart contained 6,576 words found in six lexicons, five word lists and forty-two readers, and the Reader Chart contained 407 words found only in the readers. The analysis revealed: dominant categories and percentages, word and cumulative word frequencies, high and low frequency words, and the percentage of words found in the basal readers as compared to the lexicographical sources.