There were things that were better in the past, and there are things that are better now. The extent to which the individual things weigh on particular individuals varies (as does, in some cases, the idea as to which is better – some of us like things moving at slower natural speeds, others are more adapted to modern artificially-sped-up inputs.) The extent to which people were shielded as children also varies; as does the extent to which adults remember the unhappier portions of their childhoods; and the extent to which their current lives are happy.
I wish I could pick and choose selected things about life from the 50’s and 60’s, from now, and from some of the points inbetween. But we’ve only got such options in our imaginations; and some of my desires would conflict with each other. Imagining is good; being aware of what portions of imagination could or should be applied, or at least be attempted to apply, to future life is a really useful distinction.
As seen often on those Facebook posts complaining about how math is taught. “Why are they going through all of these steps just to subtract two numbers? Why can’t they just subtract them?” Forgetting, of course, that all of those steps are how you “just subtract them”, and that that’s the way the complainer learned it, too, decades before.
This has not really been addressed, accurately. The “dressing nice” does not really refer to parts of clothing that were manufactured in a particular way. “Dressing nice” more refers to the fact that men tended to wear jackets that resembled suit coats or sport jackets where today a man doing the same activity–shopping, attending a sports event, even going to church–would be wearing a polo shirt or T-shirt or hoodie. And before Jack Kennedy killed the fashion, all men would be wearing hats. Similarly women would have been wearing dresses or skirts instead of slacks and they, too, would have been wearing hats. Jeans were only for people actively engaged in labor (or, occasionally, sports) and shorts were worn only in parks or the beach.
As for the longings of nostalgia, those have been addressed–now get off my lawn.
I once read about a psychological phenomenon† whereby our memory mixes up the chronological order of our emotions about the past. As an example, the first time I came home from war, I found myself reminiscing pleasantly about my time there. When I went back for a second time, I was reminded that was not pleasant while it was happening.
The phenomenon supposedly replaced the emotions I felt while in the warzone with the emotions I felt upon reflecting, after I was home safe.
There does seem to be some shift in how it is taught or the focus on understanding over algorithm, but I agree that schools didn’t just teach the algorithms like some people seem to think.
I think the difference is that much of that was done in class, and wasn’t on the worksheets and stuff taken home. The assignment usually just had the problems.
I think this is exactly what @split_p_j was addressing. Back in the day, there weren’t separate outerwears for “formal” and “just want to stay warm”. There were jackets, and that was it, so when you went out, you wore a jacket.
It’s worse than that. A lot of adults think that “just subtract them” is the algorithm.
There were certainly different jackets for more formal and for less formal situations; though modern eyes may sometimes have trouble telling the difference.
What strikes modern eyes as odd is suit-and-tie, or dress/skirt and hat, on people in situations (including in warm weather) in which people now would not be wearing those clothes. One simply didn’t go into town without them. I remember putting on a skirt to do routine grocery shopping; and I’ve seen photos of farm shows at which all the people who’d come to watch tractor demonstrations and walk through livestock barns were in suit and tie (with the occasional woman of course in a dress.) These days they’ll all, of whatever gender, be in jeans or cargo pants, with some shorts if the weather’s warm. – ETA: my father would put on jacket and tie to go out to dinner – not at anyplace fancy, just at a diner or Howard Johnson’s. He’d grumble about it, because he hated ties, but he’d do it, because you just did.
What kills me is when people my mother’s age (82) do that complaining - but it’s not exactly that they forget those steps are how you “just subtract them”. I had to stop my mother from confusing my 30-ish kids when they were young. She’d try to help them with their homework but couldn’t understand what they were doing. Thing is, I couldn’t understand the way my mother was doing it. Apparently there wasn’t just one change and the way I was taught in the 70s was not the way my mother was taught in the 50s - but it seems that she forgot about that when she was in her 50s.
I suppose some of it might be that but there has to be more to it - most of the people I hear complain about crime being worse now than when they were young are my age and went to high school in NYC when I did. And it absolutely was more dangerous then than it has been for the last twenty- something years. I sometimes jokingly say that the difference is that when we were teenagers, we knew the people hanging out on the corner and weren’t afraid of them while now, they are strangers and seem scary. And then I wonder if that actually has something to do with the difference.
I can sympathize with people our mothers’ age, because for them, some of the methods really did change (the “New Math” that Lehrer famously sang about). But most of the folks who complain about “New Math” that’s “completely different than in their day” are folks my age, who were, in fact, taught in exactly that way.
I, for one, am very glad we don’t have to dress as they did in the 50’s. For women that included girdles, garters, gloves, hats, make-up. Ugh! Not my bag never was.
I remember my 4th. grade teacher Mrs. McKendry wearing straight cut knee length dresses. She was not a thin woman, and she would sit down to read to us and we could see her garters. Ugh! I wore those for a happily very short time when I was very young and very thin. I can only imagine the pain of sitting, standing, or putting those things on for any period of time.
My only nostalgia is missing those of my family who have died. I also miss my kids being babies, toddlers, young kids. Those, with all the trials, and bumps in the road, were some of the happiest times. They weren’t happy because of when, though, but because of what was happening.
There’s a sort of unfocused yearning for, and maybe even mourning times and places that have gone. They’re always remembered very rosily, because we generally forget the frustrating parts. Like remembering being a kid and how awesome it was relative to being a grownup and having to deal with all the BS of being a grownup, and how secure you may have felt as a kid, etc… But this sort of nostalgia is almost always kind of a “hindsight always has rose colored glasses” sort of nostalgia. We never really remember how bad being a kid sucked- we had very little autonomy in a lot of ways- what we ate, when we slept, what we did, etc… Stuff that if you were to plop someone’s adult consciousness back in time into their kid body, they’d HATE it absolutely. But nobody thinks about that- it’s more the sense of safety, security, and comfort that they remember.
Then there’s the second kind, which is more focused- for me, it’s doing things like going back 25-30 years into the past and re-doing some aspects of my life differently. Not necessarily regret, but a feeling like I could have done so much better had I only known a few small things. I was an adult back then, and do remember the insecurity, low money, dating nonsense, and so forth. Even then I think back and wonder if it’s worth it; would I really want to relive the last quarter-century to do some things differently? There’s a lot of stuff that is here in 2022 that wasn’t there in 1997, and I’m not sure that their absence wouldn’t drive me absolutely insane. And there are things that weren’t there then that I’d be glad to not deal with for a while as well.
But in general, 50 year old me doesn’t spend much time pining for the past, although I do admit that the first few years of married life without kids have a certain warm & fuzzy feeling because I wasn’t having to deal with dating/going out, but I still had lots of free time.
That’s my view too. But I’m not one who wants to live in the past. It’s a nice place to visit on occasion. Some folks look at the past through rose-colored glasses though. But as a woman, I’m not willing to step back and live when I had so few rights.
I can’t remember the past without it being from MY perspective. So, when I recall the late '50s, it’s not my dad’s forced conformity at work, or the pressure on my mom to only be a housewife.
No, it’s me and my friends running (we never walked anywhere, too much to DO!) to the river, then the baseball diamond, and ending at the local drug store. Leafing through the comic books we couldn’t afford, because we’d just converted our entire allowance to penny candy.
So it was the lack of responsibility that made adventures seem limitless back then. I’d never want to go back there and have a tightly-controlled job, politics and family, a mortgage… and bratty kids like me.
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Thought:
The only time we walked was to school, but we ran home afterwards!
Except that I see a lot of guys wearing such “sport coats” in summer photos. Similarly, hats were pretty much universal, as were skirts/dresses on women. Mine is not a claim that every person “dressed up” on every occasion, only that what we regard as dressing up was much more the norm.
Look at the jackets, coats, and ties in these baseball crowd photos.
Sorry taking so long to respond, but I’ve been busy with the strike that’s not going to happen. I’ll expand on that in the other thread.
Anyway, I was thinking what Chronos said. It seems to me it they had their work clothes and their regular clothes, regular clothes being pretty much uniform since they were being made at factories with similar machines. They really only had two choices, and they weren’t going out or showing up in pictures in work clothes.
We see the pictures of that now and are like wow they are so well dressed, missing the context of the time.
Keep in mind, going out at all was a special occasion. Anything was a good reason to dress up, from going shopping at a department store, to having a singalong on the Johnsons’ porch. And certainly any sporting event. Heck, look at college students back then: a lot of three-piece suits being worn to class.
A friend has a picture of ancient relatives posed in their finery. Ridiculously over-the-top today, and probably as fancy as they ever got. The caption:
Uncle Will and Aunt Martha.
About to board the Chicago & North Western Railroad
to visit Waukegan, Illinois. 1855.
Yes, I have some old pictures of my grandfather who was born in 1919. I appreciate the past, and find it interesting, but I don’t think it was better.
I get what some have said about being young, but they must realize that you don’t really know what a time was like if you were young during it.
Like I said I’m nearly 51, it’d be like me saying the 70’s and 80’s were better, let’s go back to that. I have no idea what the time was really like, and I know that.