Some things seemed so important when we were young kids. Like when I was in 3rd Grade (this would have been 1960) why was it so important to learn the words to the song Waltzing Matilda? Way Down Upon the Swannee River? Other Stephen Foster songs? Yes, I understand these were folk songs but what was the context, the educational value?
We were also taught by our teachers to recite My Country Tis of Thee, America the Beautiful and other patriotic songs. Sure, I get it but I don’t think these are part of the syllabus of today’s schools.
Dinosaurs were a large part of the elementary school program back in the 1960s but not much emphasis was placed on the ascent of man. My guess is that principals and school districts and boards were worried about blowback from religious leaders questioning the theory of creationism. Sure, we could 33spend days learning about T-Rex, Brontosaurus, Allosaurus and Triceratops and so many more – but not one mention of the evolution from the ancient apes to Australopithicus man to Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens.
Yes, we all remember diving under our desks as we were instructed by our teachers during air raid drills back then. But they barely mentioned why we were practicing these drills: the Cold War with the Soviets.
Scholastic Book Club was a big thing where we would all order specialized books to read on the side. These were not the regular textbooks that were provided by our schools; this was for those who truly enjoyed reading and the subjects were a bit more unique.
Remember fountain pens with their leaking ink cartridges? Slide rulers? Speed reading? Learning the multiplication tables? I guess we all were taught the fundamentals but I have no problem remembering key events that had nothing to do with school: the Beatles and how they changed music overnight with their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show; the Green Bay Packers winning the first Super Bowl; NASA and the Moon landing. Some things go way beyond school. And those things are important because we don’t dream about school subjects. But we do dream about icons in music, sports and science.
It must be a true challenge for our education system to stay abreast with society’s changes and transformations, from culture to technological advances to scientific inquiry to societal awareness – all restricted or filtered by geographic differences of opinion and religious tolerances or intolerances. Today of course, our kids are exposed to everything. Everything. The most curious or ambitious always find ways to really become educated. It’s all out there. So I was raised in a time of innocence (as Paul Simon later sang, “It was a time of innocence, a time of confidences” in his Bookends Theme) yet my children came of age in the easily jaded era of the 1990s and early 2000s.
I look back and if I now think about 4th, 5th, 6th grades or junior high and then high school, even back then, things were rapidly changing from what we were taught in our earliest elementary grades. Yes, life progressed rapidly since the 1960s were just crazy. We would study and read and write our book reports, but outside our windows, we saw a whole world crashing. Of course it was confusing at the time. Growing older and wiser, we could see between the cracks and today I marvel at most (not all) of my teachers back then. After all, they knew more than what they were teaching but their hands were tied to a degree. Of course, we all knew the “cool” teachers who were more with it and quietly taught us things to think about. That was an education.
My two children are grown now, ages 30 and 28. They are extremely aware and educated about the world in which they are growing up and will one day inherit from their parents. They too have their distinct memories of what it was like going to 3rd or 4th grade back in the late 90s. It will be interesting to talk with them as they begin to have their own kids and ask them about their memories of outdated artifacts from their schooling.
We made it through, our kids made it through, the system evolves, it hiccups, it reflects, it argues, it changes, it updates. There is no one fixed education system. “Mistakes were made.” It is bizarre that a system that so dominates our lives and learning process, from the ages of 5 to 17, is so different from school district to school district, from state to state. There is no true federal governance. Guidelines, yes. But that is a long time, ages 5 to 17. We are impressionable then, malleable. We enter the school system as guppies and graduate as wise asses who think we know everything. And the things that have been instilled into our brains by the many different teachers we each have during these 13 years (including Kindergarten) is astoundingly different.
Because during those 13 years, we have been taught by seven teachers from K to 6, and then from middle school or junior high to high school we have been influenced by another 50 or so teachers each with their own agendas, viewpoints, quirks and “grading systems.” And most of all, the 57 teachers I had were different from my own classmates since there were multiple teachers for each course. And we all didn’t take the same courses, so that’s even more variation within each school: not a lot of conformity. It is amazing we all survive when we are all being evaluated by a revolving door of teachers.
This is not a criticism of our teachers; it is a quandary of how students receive consistency in grading during their ongoing education.
Oh well, maybe it doesn’t really matter anyway since by the time we all get to college, everything really changes. Forget consistency. Harvard. Caltech. Juilliard. Texas A&M. Four great, wildly different universities. Where do I even begin?
Chris Ebel
11/30/21
Photo credit: @zeafonso