By nature, I’m averse to all forms of nostalgia, and am therefore pretty adept at avoiding beginning sentences with the words, “When I was a child …” The other night, however, a few of us in the over-30 crowd sat around remembering what it was like to go to grammar school back in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. We had all gone to public school, and we each had stories about what it was like. Here’s a sampling.
1. Kids divided into reading groups with such names as, “Bluebirds,” “Robins,” and “Sparrows,” where “Sparrows” was code for, “Barely reads,” “Robins” meant “mediocre, probably doomed to be this bird forever,” and “Bluebirds” meant “smart and knows it.”
2. A core curriculum centering on Fun With Dick and Jane books.
3. A married kindergarten teacher who, without explanation, disappeared all of a sudden. Later, I was with my mother in the supermarket when we ran into her. It was shocking how embarrassing it was to see her outside of school. Worse, my little saucer-sized kindergarten eyes perceived perfectly well that she was thoroughly pregnant.
4. Practicing penmanship on little blue-lined notebooks—where a dotted line indicated where the tops of the small letters should touch—and getting marked down for poor penmanship.
5. A male teacher handing out boxing gloves whenever two boys would get into a fight and then having them punch it out on the playground (he’d step in to stop the fight only if it got out of hand).
6. A kindergarten march (this tale came from my husband, who was four years old at the time—back then, moms with frisky kids could get them out of their hair by sending them off to kindergarten at four). The suburban school was moving from one building to another, about a mile away. The kids walked single file alongside the road, following the teacher, who was at the head of the long line. There was oncoming traffic, no sidewalk, and each child carried something. My husband, small for his age, was assigned the huge classroom globe.
7. Polio shots administered in the following manner: The principal (a woman) sat on a folding chair behind a curtain, up on the stage in the assembly room. One at a time, children climbed up to the stage, walked over to her, pulled down their pants, and then lay across her lap while the school nurse administered a shot in the bottom.
8. Spelling bees where you were sent back to your seat, deeply and publicly humiliated, as soon as you made a mistake.
9. Saying the “Pledge of Allegiance” at the start of every school day.
10. Drop drills, in preparation for an atom-bomb attack. Out of the blue, the teacher would yell, “Drop!” and the kids would leap from their seats and huddle under their desks.
11. A Christian prayer, led by a second-grade teacher, for a girl in the class who had died the previous night.
12. A teacher, her arm around a 9-year-old, confiding in him that macaroni jewelry had been her idea, and had it not been stolen from her she would have been rich and wouldn’t have had to teach grammar school.
23 Responses to Old-School School
hoodlib - July 22, 2010 at 4:01 pm
I remember our 5 cent chocolate milk break before morning recess. Yummy!
mr_tibs - July 22, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Wouldn’t attending grammar school in the 40s 50s and 60s more accurately be the over 40 crowd?
falzf - July 22, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Mr._tibs (#2): Well, yes, for sure! Since none of the people in this conversation (including me) has seen the decade of our 30s in eons, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether my calling us the “over-30″ crowd was a) evidence that I can’t add or subtract; b) evidence my grammar school education was wretched; c) evidence that now that I’m getting older, I’m totally losing it; d) intended as a bit of light irony. Laurie Fendrich
livefreeordie2 - July 23, 2010 at 12:14 am
Some memories mentioned I have myself – some not. . . but I would say that it would be the WELL over 40 group just to get in on the tail end of everything! When I was way too young, I used my little transistor radio (with ear phone) to listen to Jean Shepherd on WOR out of NYC. I still listen to MP3s of his old shows and of course, in the early 80s when the movie “A Christmas Story” came out, I was an instant fan. The classroom in the school Ralphie attended was very similar to those in my youth. The desks, the basic layout of the room, etc., but most of all, the alphabet in cursive above the chalkboard in the front of the classroom. Every classroom had one. My, my. . . what a long strange trip its been. . .
22011344 - July 23, 2010 at 9:03 am
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the four-year old kindergarten was reqired for all. It was the a.m. class. The five-year olds went in the p.m., and we were allowed to take our blankets for nap time– on the hard wood floors. When I started in 1949, milk was two cents. I am now 65 years old, Mr. Tibbs. Those of us who started in the 1940′s are the over-the-sixties crowd — except for the pre-WWII babies who are over 70. Laurie’s “light bit of humor” was lost on me, too; unless the world divides into over and under 30 — bimodally. We had two playgrounds — one for the girls and one for the boys. In the spring, we had fertility rites disguised as “spring dance festival” and learned to weave ribbons around the May Pole.
firstgenprof - July 23, 2010 at 9:04 am
I remember putting wonder bread bags on our feet so we could slide into our rubber boots easier for that loooong walk to school in wet cold weather. And how about those timed multiplication tests when the ones who finished first would slam their pencils down on their desk to let the rest of us know they were finished?
jjdeal - July 23, 2010 at 9:05 am
Thank you for this. I have been having these nostalgic moments more frequently of late…mostly in response to what I see as unintended consequences of more complex technological innovations. I never thought I would ever use the term “the good old days,” because I didn’t ever think they were all that good. But, maybe they were…
bioemeritus - July 23, 2010 at 9:14 am
And, except for the very large numbers of students in class and the inability to do anything for the “sparrows” or any student with a learning disability, the education we received far surpasses that now available in most elementary schools. And our teachers probably had only 2 years of teacher training! What does that say about the state of modern education?
nyhist - July 23, 2010 at 9:15 am
I remember ‘released time’ for religious education on certain afternoons. The children who didn’t take part (a few Jews, others whose parents had not agreed) stayed in the classroom while the rest of us went to meet with our pastors/teachers. Am I glad that practice is long gone. I never thought about how the kids left in the room felt about their circumstances. Our elementary school had exterior doors labeled ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ but we didn’t use them that way or have sex-segregated recess as a previous poster commented. This was in the 1950s. Most of my female teachers were “Miss” someone. The only “Mrs” was an older woman with grown children. I didn’t have a male teacher until I reached junior high (but there was a male teacher, the principal, natch, in my school; I just wasn’t in his class).
11182967 - July 23, 2010 at 9:30 am
Familar nostalgic moments (and how about playing tonettes?), but in retrospect the most significant thing about my school days (b. 1942, graduated HS 1960) was the homogeneity of my class mates. In Waterford Township, Michigan the “exotic” kids were the few of Italian ethnicity (see also American Bandstand and West Side Story). I didn’t meet a Black person my age until, as a senior in high school, I went to a fencing class at Pontiac Central High School (a dozen miles away, maybe) in preparation for playing Cyrano. The past has lots of warm fuzzies, but what didn’t occur is often as important as what did.
glord - July 23, 2010 at 10:45 am
Beginning class with “The Lord’s Prayer” as well as the pledge.
lisalita - July 23, 2010 at 11:20 am
That thing about the “sparrows” is heartbreaking. Our school was nearly all white and black kids were treated as exotic. Some kids were treated by the teachers as hopeless. I can only imagine what it must have been like for kids with learning disabilities before the era of brain research. But yes, all the other stuff was fun and cute! It just makes me shudder to think how I was automatically one of the elite and others were left by the wayside.
hypatia - July 23, 2010 at 12:43 pm
I vaguely remember having to get under my desk during drills in grade 1. But that film about “Duck and Cover” brings back all-too-realistically the huge fears I had some years later, during the Cuban Crisis. My mother began to stock food in the basement, in preparation for an attack. (Rich people built bomb shelters.) I constantly worried, if there was a bomb, about how my family would all get home in time. I feared I would never see them again–we would all be in different places (school, work, home). And I was old enough to understand quite a bit about what the survivors of a nuclear attack would endure.
dank48 - July 23, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Those forty-cent lunches . . . especially those beef manhattans, two slices of that square bread (how’d they make that?) with a slab of tinned beef topped with mashed potatoes and gravy. I just finished lunch, but I’d gladly slap down forty dollars for such a manhattan right now, and I’d eat it too. At my rural Indiana all-twelve-grades-in-one-building school, there was exactly one Catholic family, no Jews, no blacks, no anyone else “exotic.” We were pretty much an unhomogenized mixture of various strains of British Isles white trash. Diversity meant Kentuckians whose parents were looking for work. Diversity was not extended to, say, pregnant high schoolers.A senior killed drag-racing when I was in fourth grade led to the whole school closing for his funeral. Watching the World Series on a b&w TV in the study hall; ditto Mercury launches. Pleasant to visit for a harmless shot of nostalgia. And I wouldn’t have it come back for anything.
philosophy - July 23, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Elementary school during WWII is pretty fuzzy now, but I do remember fire drills. Several times a year the principal would place a big red box somewhere in a hallway and the first kid to see it was to pull a fire alarm lever, and teachers would march all us kids out the designated exit routes. It was a big deal to see the box first and pull the lever – I never did :-(
mxb22 - July 23, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Fendrich’s memories match mine, which suggests there was something of a “common culture,” even a “conservative” milieu in the 1940s and 50s. I remember school as a warm, safe, dependable place where there was noticeable order and authority, and even learning taking place. Principals, teachers and school boards in those days made choices, meaning that students were judged, directed, and sometimes saddened. I’m confident that many parents today would prefer to have their children attend such schools. But what we have instead are institutions that believe the worst thing that could possibly happen is that any student or parent should feel offended or disappointed. The only forms of “worship” permitted are environmentalism, multiculturalism and secularism. Thus, the public school itself has become the problem, as it does not reflect citizens’ values so much as it does those of teachers’ unions, educational bureaucrats and Democratic activists. We can’t turn backwards, but we needn’t keep going in this depressing direction. A partial remedy would be to continue privatizing most primary and secondary education, as we do higher education. Use vouchers to create schools that stand for something besides testing. Religious schools, political schools, ethnic schools, racial schools, art schools, whatever. Let a hundred flowers bloom, because there is no longer a public culture that has any coherence. Such diversity would usually not be wise policy, but when the legitimacy of the majority is contested at every turn by perverse readings of the Constitution, a kind of tribalism, with sufficient tolerance, begins to look attractive.
11161452 - July 24, 2010 at 12:28 am
My formative education in a Catholic school was not so different from what is described here. Maybe the trappings had a bit of a “fire and brimstone” edge–such as the math paper where I unwittingly ignored a whole line of the problems, resulting in the nun rubber-stamping it like mad with the image of a weeping angel and the word “careless!” Funny how I still remember that. There was also the occasional slipped-in moral lesson. I recall a day on the playground when a nun (not the rubber stamper) asked if I would be so kind to share my bag of shoestring potatoes with her. Nuns eat shoestring potatoes? Nuns eat?! I got over the shock and gave her a few, of couse, aware that I was being informally tested. We were also segregated into reading groups (I was an Apache), and I remember even at the age of 8 having the vague feeling this just wasn’t right somehow.
lumackie80 - July 25, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Polio vaccines were not used until the 50s and 60s. Dick and Jane were gone by then. It’s funny how our memory gets warped over time. I was a forties public school child. Three recesses a day; morning snack w/recess; lunch with recess; afternoon with recess; hot balanced meals in the cafeteria; nothing but milk to drink; reading sessions were groups 1, 2, and 3, and Dick, Jane, and Spot were there with us. We had great programs in the auditorium, which was separate from the cafeteria, and had real auditorium seating. I received a wonderful education.
goxewu - July 25, 2010 at 8:04 pm
“For nearly 40 years, from 1930 through about 1970, more than 85 million American schoolchildren learned to read using the Dick and Jane readers that were part of a series published by the Scott Foresman Company.”—Edward Moran, St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002.
balancing_act - July 26, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Goxewu, funny, I was in kindergarten in 1977-78 and I read Dick and Jane. By the time I got to 4th grade, the school lunches had reached a whopping 35 cents and parents were not pleased that year. I think it must have been 25 cents prior to that. My kindergarten memories consist of the painful ruler: if you were wearing pants, you had to receive the harsh slap of the ruler on your hands which were placed on the teacher’s desk. If you were wearing shorts, she got you on the back of the thighs. I guess I was a troublemaker from the beginning . . .
jabberwocky12 - July 27, 2010 at 1:17 am
I don’t remember much of my early schooling with fondness – fire and brimstone, rulers over the knuckles, being beaten for playing tub-o-war with our measles (mumps?) scarves while in the sick bay, etc. What I _do_ happily remember is my first kiss while standing in the garden just outside the classroom. And kindness from some teachers.In later life, as I met people who were not fortunate enough to have had polio and other vaccinations, I remembered those also.
robertswh - July 29, 2010 at 2:07 pm
The CDC states that polio vaccination in the US began in 1955. That gives a comfortable crossover with Dick and Jane readers, which were published through 1965. Here are some examples: http://www.juliascollectibles.com/DJ60.htm
zarathustra - July 30, 2010 at 11:50 am
I was born in 1968 and we had Dick and Jane, 5 cent milks, 40 cent hot lunches, but no duck and cover. I’m amazed that I walked to school by myself everyday (1/2 mile, along a busy street) starting in 1st grade, though riding a bike took special permission until 3rd or 4th grade.