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 Remembering The Good Old Days...
(Remembering Today)
ByBryan E. Hall, MPW
School Days, School DaysGood old golden rule days... Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic,Taught to the tune of a hickory stick...
These lines used to be sung with a positive reminiscence by young people whohad completed their education, despite its difficulties. The song did not conjure upmentally incapacitating trauma from days gone by of physical abuse and overlydemanding educators. Instead, most people of this era review the experience as
character building.
The methods have all but disappeared slowly but surely since thesixties, when it was apparently decided that disciplinarians and those with high demandswere
damaging self-esteem,
etc. A whole new vocabulary of enabling replaced the age-old classical assumptions that
learning has not occurred if it has been easy.
 Not to blame all of the current rash of violence and sex on the failings on currenteducational methods, but it is all related to a general sense of guilt which parents andauthorities throughout history have felt,
the guilt of the executioner.
For many years, thegunmen of the firing squad were given one bullet among several shooters, so no one manwould feel the guilt and one could therefore deem himself innocent of the act, in somestrange way.The same guilt has always existed, and the methods that accompany the guilt havevaried. Mothers have said, “Wait until your father gets home.” As schools consolidatedand enlarged, teachers deferred corporal punishment to the principal, or schools created“Deans” of discipline, Assistant Principals, etc. to hand out the sentences and the punishments. The teachers, after all, did not want to be viewed as “policemen,” “pigs” asthey were called by the anti-establishment politicos who had gained notoriety.In these economically charged late fifties and sixties, though mothers were, inever increasing numbers, entering the work force, America was developing a new class of  bourgeois, the
beatnik 
or 
hippie.
They were usually considered college students whowere simply expressing their freedom of speech, outrage at the repressive regime which perpetuated war and violence, “Peace, Man.” The popular assumption effectivelydisregarded the notion that many of these “activists” were simply kids who did not have a job, go to college, contribute to intellectual product or, really anything other thansmoking pot, and having sex at respective “Woodstock” arenas. These young peoplewere a product of a very fortunate society. They had come to view themselves as“invulnerable.” After all, with only a haircut and a few interviews, they could at anytime, join the establishment they opposed.
 
 Remembering The Good Old Days
Page 2Bryan E. Hall
In the sixties, with the onset of the prevalence of divorce, images of singlemothers entered popular consciousness, mostly through television, now that few of theworking class read books. Some of them worked, and others were posed as victims of adulterous men who consequently paid vast child support and alimony so the mother andchildren could continue to live in the style to which they were accustomed. The image of the
unmarried 
single mother, needing not a man, had not been considered quite yet, butwould follow.Though many have “blamed” Dr. Spock for the enabling characteristics of childrearing established during this period, he was but a reflection, a concrete validation of theattitudes that the guilty had finally rooted in popular policy. Many of the hippies becameteachers. Most became parents. Quickly, they came to power in the bureaucracy theyhad opposed. These new principals and boards of education, and the parents who wouldsupport them, were a fertile market for a Doctor, who by his own admission, had not thecredentials to self-proclaim expertise, as a child psychologist. However, he simply toldthis generation what they wanted to hear, and he sold a lot of books. This made itofficial. ‘Let your children make their own decisions, express their creativity withoutyour repressive structure...’ and ‘If you dare lay a hand on your child, you are anabuser!’ These became the war-cry of the peaceniks, the huddled masses yearning to“make love, not war.”Dr. Spock’s books are still best sellers, despite his own admission of failure atraising his own children. The methods have become entrenched in the K-12 educationalestablishment, and now have a variety of very impressive nomenclatures.“Inclusion” and “Student-Centered Learning” became catch phrases to justify avariety of enabling behaviors by teachers. The teachers who had successfullyimplemented techniques, which seemed to satisfy these new standards, were held up as proof of their superiority. ‘If we could only duplicate these models of success,’ becamethe goal of the new establishment. The result was many mediocre teachers lacked thetalent or intelligence to understand or implement these newfound models. However, theyused these terms to justify their having turned over their responsibilities to the students.The NEA (National Education Association) who had become one of the largestunions and political lobbying organizations, was successful at further codification, asthese practices were the center of teacher education at most institutions. Those who didnot espouse these methods were called “old-fashioned” or “conservative” which had become a code word for “fascist”, just as “liberal” had become the code for “communist.”The polarity of factions ran traditionalists out of K-12 public education, and into privateschools and into institutions of higher learning, where today they still lecture, test, andexclude students who fail to maintain discipline.Meanwhile, the pipeline of K-12 had become full and began graduating students,who reversed the trend in standardized testing. Walter Cronkite, the most credible and popular news broadcaster in the world, opened a broadcast with, “Johnny can’t read!” asthe focus of a report on the fall of literacy and college entrance examination scores. Theresponse of the educational establishment was blame on funding, a lack of requiredcertification by states, and an increase in crime. The latter of which, was at least partiallyto the credit of the educators who denounced it.In the late seventies, the SAT, the leading college entrance exam, lowered itsscale in the form of scoring modifications and question difficulty. Though they had only
 
 Remembering The Good Old Days
Page 3Bryan E. Hall
 been a reflection of the failure of K-12, they had become “the bearer of bad news” andthe establishment had to kill the messenger, blaming them for racial and sociological biasin their testing. This technique was very successful in vilifying all but the teachers, inthis period of enabling that produced a new set of double-standards for women andminorities (which combined had become the political majority.)Student-Centered Learning and Inclusion had become for most, an excuse for appealing to the lowest common denominator (LCD) in the classroom. Excellentstudents were dominated by poorly disciplined students who had been positively andsympathetically labeled as “under-achievers” or “attention-deficit disorder” (ADD), bothcategories of which, certainly legitimately existed. But, in the name of additionalfunding, an entirely new and ever-enlarging infrastructure developed. Publishers, politicians, and “certified” mediocre teachers found a new method to fill their pockets, justify their votes, and guarantee their jobs respectively. New textbooks which consistedof far more lessons and pages, subsequently of a higher price, addressing a variety of “interest based” lessons, began to dominate the market. The basics were consideredoutdated and insufficient. Those who supported the teaching of classical material wereactually blamed for the failure, as they were assumed to be lacking of the modernmethods necessary to compete in the new world order.The modern education regime fell under ever-increasing scrutiny, and they foundnew ways to firm their hold on K-12. They encouraged lawmakers to “raise thestandards” by requiring certification of a larger number of teachers. Many experiencedteachers, insulted by the insistence on re-education, left the profession or moved tocolleges and universities to teach and/or advance their own educations for other  professional fields. Corporate training became a lucrative field because of the gap left byinferior K-12. Remedial courses were introduced and expanded at colleges as a necessityto make up for the inadequacy of preparation.K-12 public education was left with the ‘miserable enjoying their own company,’and a few committed traditionalists who enjoyed a good fight.The inferiors developed new ways to justify their existence, creating new tests,which biased their evaluations. Even less emphasis was on subject productivity as theywere scurrying to prove their success despite their failure. However, even on these testsfor teachers and students developed by the very people who caused the inferiority, theevidence of comparative decay advanced.In the eighties, computers surpassed books in the educational economy. Books became thicker and graphic appeal, style, became more important than content. Theattempt to make reading easier, and more interesting with pictures, drew the educational process closer to making and watching movies, which was far more popular thanlearning. People were more willing to pay for entertainment than education, as thefinancial markets would prove. Desktop publishing put more emphasis on the look of thewriting. Grammar and spell-check did, in fact, help to confront the failing of education, by increasing the productivity of their now illiterate employees. However, schools were pressured by marketing and popular opinion, to incorporate all of the capabilities of computers and calculators into the classroom.Though corporations would have preferred a higher level of literacy for itsemployees, it was more expedient in the short term to maximize productivity by replacing people skills with computing power. The educational mediocrity establishment found yet
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