Curious Customs of a Faraway Country: Schoolin’

We’re talking that distant realm called “the past.” As in, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley.) Also, “[F]or time is the longest distance between two places.” (Tennessee Williams.) Got it? All right, then.....

I recently celebrated a birthday. Not that I needed the occasion to think back on things; I just thought I’d bring it up. I’m closing in on the completion of my sixth decade on this Earth, as a citizen of the dominant, albeit moribund empire on the planet in the early 21st century.

This means I have memories from the late-middle to late 20th century. It’s the period from the late 1960s to the late 1980s that fascinates me most, because it’s when so much changed, “some forever, not for better,” as another former young man once sang. 

Looking west down Parklane Road in northeast Columbia, South Carolina, February 1977, a year before they turned it into a four-lane. I took this photo with an old Brownie camera and developed it old-school style in a darkroom for a photography class.

I’m not sure when this changed, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s when I was already out of school, but I remember when you could fail a grade. And by “fail a grade” I mean, “you didn’t go on to the next.” 

Go ahead and send your parents in to yell at the principal. If your marks were bad, too bad, you should have done better. You repeated the grade until you got it right. (I actually knew one kid who repeated 9th grade four times until he finally stood up in the middle of class one day, screamed, “I can’t take this anymore!” and ran out never to return. By then, he was old enough not to bother, anyway.) You were stuck with the little kids coming up, and they most certainly would not look up to you for your advanced age. Indeed, you’d look pretty stupid being the biggest kid in the class. 

It was enough of a mark of shame if you had to attend summer school, which was your only option if you wanted to attend next year’s classes with your peers. You weren’t just wasting your summer. You were a fool.

Shame was a thing back in the day, but that’s more than I can wrap my head around right now. Honestly, there was a lot of bad to go with the good it enforced, and I would make it clear that I do not write any of this out of nostalgia. My line for all those pining for the Good Ol’ Days: How truly golden was your Golden Age if all it came to was this? 

This is the part where one might post a photo of 10-year-old cross-dressers with their garishly attired adult groomers by way of driving home the point, but I’d rather look at these cows instead. The countryside west of where I live...ah, you’d hate it. Seriously, cows? Boring! “Eeew, how can you stand it? There’s nothing out here!”

Something that never comes up, even among putative conservatives is that, up until sometime between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the 1950s, high school was optional. That’s why it was called high school; it was higher education for those children of Good Families who aspired to go to college and take their place among the managerial classes. The rest were free to find jobs, or, better yet, apprenticeships to trades. It was what most people did, and by the age of 17 the smarter and more able ones were as good as full-grown men, fit to support a family.

But then someone got the bright idea all young people, regardless of interest or inclination, should be forced to sit at desks and regurgitate meaningless information for state-mandated tests until age 18. Children could not work to draw a paycheck until age 16. Oh, and now everyone is expected to go to college. You don’t want to be some dumb plumber, do ya? Naw, sir, you wanna work with your mind.

Oh, how I could go on. Suffice it to say, “I was the first in my family to go to college” is a quaint expression in A.D. 2019. I was the second generation in my family to go to college, and I’m proud that both of my adult children have ignored that mandate of mid- to late-20th century U.S. civic fashion—and, wouldn’t you know it, are making more money doing their respective things that their grandmother or I ever did. 

A broken, antique manure spreader enshrined in a stone-facade flower garden in the fading sun seems an apt metaphor for U.S. education, n’est-ce pas?

Like much of the mildewed and rotten furniture of our changing culture, the only way to fix our education system, K-12 and college alike, is to torch it. Burn it down, brush away the ashes, and build something that doesn’t waste everyone’s time, patience, and money. 

Educate people according to their gifts. If a child enjoys solving math puzzles but hates reading books and writing book reports, don’t make him read novels, and don’t make him write book reports. Train him how to write for his field and stop going out of your way to make such people miserable. Same deal with liberal arts types. Stop making people who will never use anything beyond common everyday arithmetic suffer through polynomial equations.

And what’s up with sitting at these desks for hours at a time listening to some jackass drone on and on until everyone glazes over in a stupor of ennui? And as for those children who can’t be fussed to learn nothin’, who just show up to cut-up....

We’ll stop here. We all know nothing so sensible will be permitted to happen. The smart people will homeschool. That’s all. Given what my own children went through, it’s what I’d do if I could do it all over again.

“All we need is an internet connection and we’re good to go.”