Like all of us to some extent, I am a product of an educational system. I had the great fortune of what might be called a balanced education. Balanced is my shorthand description, one curriculum planner group said, “Education must be concerned with the whole life of a child.”
My K-12 education included athletics, vocations and academics. Having an education was important to my parents’ generation; they felt it was a key to a successful adulthood, but they largely deferred the details to the school systems of my youth.
My parents were from what is often labeled the “Greatest Generation” or, a somewhat less grand term I just recently learned, the “Silent Generation.” My dad grew up during the Great War (as they later discovered had to be labeled WWI), then became an Army sergeant in the less requisitely named World War II. He’d been through the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919, and the 1930’s optimistically named Great Depression (as if there might only be one) along with the Roaring Twenties. He was a college graduate from rural Montana in a niche field. This conveniently tagged him for immediate military service in January of 1942 shipping off to Australia, where they desperately needed people with his background.
Life, I think, is about getting shoved in the deep end of the pool with the sharks and surviving.
The schools of my youth had curriculums created by the Greatest Generation that included a diversity of subjects like social studies, history, music, art, creative writing, science, math, shop, foreign languages and physical education. I recall tearing down and successfully rebuilding a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine in seventh grade shop, while learning about Greek tragedies, writing seemingly endless research papers on civics, government, history, social studies, and running the hill outside my school nearly every day in PE. I had woodshop and metal shop. I learned architectural drafting along with math, chemistry and physics — what later would get labeled STEM.
Having had kids of my own go through more recent educational tracks, I am amazed at just how much curriculum planners of my youth crammed into my day. And how well they did it.
Today, I wonder when did education become so divisive?
