|
|
 |
School Days
By Abraham Lincoln
Times have changed. If I live until my birthday I will be 81.
I have lived through the Great Depression that ruined lives and
bankrupted whole communities.
I have starved until mother made enough money washing and ironing Herb
Hamel’s bushel basket of clothes and got paid so we could buy something
to eat for $2.00 a week.
I remember the fear of World War II, and our neighbors who lost sons in
Italy, Germany and on islands in the South Pacific.
I have vivid memories of my school days when Miss Brown turned on the
small Crosley radio; we students collected paper for the war effort,
and got enough money to buy the radio with; and how we listened to
Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London while bombs fell all around
him.
Those were the days when we had nothing more than a swing set at school
with very strict rules on who could use it, and the slide, and the
teeter-totter. We did not have inside toilets or running water and we
did not have central air because the windows had been painted shut
years before.
We did not have sports except the softball bat we bought like we bought
the ball to hit it with.
We bought the bat and ball from proceeds we made collecting everything
from scrap metal to milkweed seed pods used in the war effort.
The emphasis in our school was on education and our parents would have
had a fit if the emphasis was placed somewhere else.
We were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history.
The emphasis was on making students ready for anything the world had to
offer; and that kind of education produced most of the world’s leaders
in everything from politics to the most famous religious icons in the
world.
Having been through the Great Depression, most parents did not borrow
money for anything.
If a child wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer and the parents had the
means, that child went to college. The kids in my school went on to
become school teachers, school principals, school superintendents,
doctors, dentists, lawyers, merchants, and ordinary moms and dads who
produced children like you do.
Even “I” was a school teacher; and I worked in Research and Development
in engineering; and I did a 13-week television series (I had my own
television program shown around the world); and I was a cowboy, and an
undercover agent, and a publisher, and an author of three dozen books
(all were published); and a producer of videos and the father of 5
children who graduated from Brookville High School. I felt like there
wasn’t anything in this world that I could not do or could not become
in spite of the fact that my Gordon school taught the things I needed
or used to become what I became. We all had one room and one teacher
for all 8 grades.
On the other hand, my children were introduced to all those things so
common in the school systems today. They took it all for granted and
those things, somehow, made them a cut above the rest of the Kids from
Gordon.
But the gyms they had did nothing to education them for their future.
The school lunch menus that offered a variety of foods and pop machines
didn’t help them with their education but it kept mom from packing five
lunches.
I am sure the school library is a great thing to have but the education
they got didn’t come through the library at school any more than it
came from the Blue Devil football bleachers.
There is always a lot of hype about education — it’s all hype.
Times have changed and I am not sure it has been all that good.
© 2015 Abraham Lincoln
|
|
|
<
|
