When we were smart. [View All]

[SoCalDem]

Think, for a minute, about just who taught the people who started the Space program, who taught the successful people who have recently retired, or the ones soon to retire.

There was a time when America led the world in education.

I am not talking about "higher education" or the Ivy League colleges...just your basic run of the mill elementary/secondary system that most of us participated in.

I was born in 1949, and for the time that I spent inside the US, there were MANY small neighborhood schools. Every morning, a parade of neighborhood kids trekked a few blocks to their school. Their teachers were likely to have been women,....women who most likely were single and older..

When people had stable/steady jobs, they did not move all the time, so these children all knew each other, and knew each other well.. their mothers probably pushed them in their strollers, together, and they would go on to the same junior high, and senior high.

It was all gradual, and easy.. It was just a slow and steady progression.

The local primary school may have encompassed a 4 block radius, and then the junior high maybe a 12 block radius, and then onto the "big pond" of high school.

Kids were tested, and school was not "easy", but most of these kids were taught by teachers without a masters degree.

It seems that with each "new method" that came along after the 70's, there were just more layers of chaos piled up, one on top of the other, and more attention was paid to the process, than to the actual teaching in the classroom.

Schools are just so big these days, and the pressures on kids & teachers are so intense.. I feel badly for all of them.

Apparently those "old-timey" teachers had something right, because the kids they taught seemed quite well-prepared to go on to college, and to do some pretty amazing things.

It's too bad so many of them are gone now. They might have given some guidance we need desperately these days..