Slow learner

Sing along with me: “School days, school days. Good ‘ol Golden Rule Days. Reading and writing and ‘rithmatic…taught to the tune of a hickory stick…”

Yeah, it’s that time of year again. Wally-World’s aisles are stacked with pencils, notebooks and sundry scholarly gizmos, and ChezTarget is touting the latest classroom couture. We’re sending the kids back to school … and some of them off to school for the first time.

I’m guessing that no one forgets their first moments in academia. New shoes, fresh haircut, clean underwear…a very little person edging into a very big building surrounded by people of varying shapes and sizes, none of whom you’d ever seen before but now are in charge of anything you will say, do, or even think; and right then, your biggest worry is how to find the bathroom.

As for my first day, it was back when Dick, Jane, and Sally reigned in big print over the written word. Hard wooden school desks were bolted to the floor in rigid straight lines, and lunch was brought from home in a stamped-steel lunch box that doubled as an anti-bully cudgel while waiting for the bus or on the walk home.

I was a dumb little kid, six-years-old and fresh off the farm. Back in the day, the wisdom of my elders determined that since kindergarten primarily involved a half-day of learning to tie shoes, sit still, and take naps, those were instructional duties that could well be accomplished in the family home at much lower public expense. For me, public schooling started, logically enough, at grade one and would progress arithmetically for the following twelve years, culminating with a reasonably literate, numerate, employable individual.

Nowadays, it appears that things are done differently. I have a photo of my granddaughter brandishing a diploma, decked out in mortar board and academic regalia. She’s five. I have no idea when they started sewing graduation gowns in toddler sizes, but, cute as she may be, I have to question a formal graduation ceremony for kids who have yet to enter kindergarten. I fear this whole school thing is getting out of hand…

I mean, really… Three-year-olds are being sent to pre-pre-school – classrooms set up to get them ready for the classroom that will get them ready to go to the kindergarten classroom where they get ready to go to first grade where they are introduced to the contemporary equivalents of Dick, Jane, and Sally. For the next dozen years they’ll be drilled, redrilled, tested, retested, fretted over and stressed out lest they fail to master the roster of state capitals, quadratic equations, and the atomic number of potassium, after which they will be expected to enroll in college in order to rack up a student debt that, with luck, they may discharge before they’re eligible for Social Security.

Methinks it’s time to lighten up.

School was a significant part of my life throughout those dozen years, but only a part and usually far from the most important. By the time Mrs. Baker was done with me by June of that first year, I had mastered the basics of reading, writing and doing simple sums. The next eleven were really just elaborations and variations of those essential skills. Over a lifetime, most of what occupied classroom time and attention has amounted to little more than fun facts to know and tell … and nobody has ever demanded to see my permanent record or Iowa Basic Test score.

Truth be told, stuff I really needed to know I learned from friends, relatives, neighbors and folks I didn’t like one little bit…stuff like how to disagree without getting my nose punched or how to do what needed to be done to hold a job and pay the rent. Stuff that didn’t make it into the school curriculum…then or now. Let’s have a little perspective, people. Childhood shouldn’t be confined to a classroom. Every kid is far more than the sum of their test scores, and, over a lifetime, the person who teaches us the most will be ourselves. Let’s hope those kids get a good educat