Back to School...

“Personally I’m always ready to learn,
But I do not always like being taught.” (Winston Churchill)

There was a time when one hundred dollars was more than enough to buy school clothes and supplies for one or two students to start school–now it takes almost that much money to buy tennis shoes for gym class. The nickel Baby Ruth candy bar was as large as the ninety-nine cent bar is today.

There weren’t any TVs, or calculators, or computers. We had to learn how to read and cipher the old fashioned way, in our empty heads.

We lived in fear about being sent to the principal’s office, and today a teacher can’t lay a hand on an obstreperous student for fear of dismissal. (Remember how we learned to spell “principal”? PAL, they would say, the principal is your pal.) Yes he was.

If a female teacher married, she was no longer employed. Girls began to wear make up in high school. Only boys smoked. In the forties, high school was cut to 11 years so the “boys” could enlist in the military. There was a war on. Everyone had a draft number. Our country was at stake. Many of our high school graduates didn’t wait for “their number to come up,” but joined the service on their own.

Mothers didn’t work outside of the home as a general rule. This meant Mom was there when you arrived home from school. Dad came home at a regular hour, because he only needed one job to care for his family. There was an aunt or a grandmother nearby. There were chores to do before you went out to play. You played marbles, or jacks, or if you had a knife, mumbly peg, or you skipped rope. We didn’t realize we were deprived.

The childhood diseases that we suffered through then we are vaccinated against now. We had telephones, but we hardly ever used them to call each other. The phones were for the grownups, along with many other things we used to reserve for adulthood. Maybe that’s what is different.

Youngsters are older now.