Yes, we can. Honestly. We might be a little more sensitive to having one-on-one conversations behind closed doors, but that’s about it.
I agree. My public school was big and old and had huge windows and beautiful architecture. Big columns out front and everything. Schools nowadays look boring.
What HASN’T changed?
I was born in 1961 and went to Catholic schools from Kindergarten through high school. I got all the last of the old-school, disciplinarian nuns before they retired.
The school I went to is still open, but there are no more nuns on the faculty, and I’m sure recent graduates wouldn’t recognize the school I could describe to them.
We had only four elements in chemistry.
Not trying to be overly contrary here, but I went to a number of school buildings: first and third elementaries built inthe fifties, second elementary school was brand new when I started in 1979, two middle school campuses - one from the seventies and one dating back to about 1950, and a high school built around 1970. Ugly, each and every one. I know the older style of building you mean: usually red brick, columned portico, multi-story. Those are very attractive, but not all of the older schools were built in that style. My son attends my old high school, but it’s a new building, and much more attractive than any that I attended, as are the two new elementary schools nearby.
This is all from public schools:
a) Corporal punishment —In grade school they would hit us kids with those paddleball paddles (with the rubber band and ball removed of course) — for cheating on tests or homework, for talking repeatedly in class, for stealing from other kids, for saying dirty words or backtalking the teacher, even for failing to have one’s homework done. In junior high things escalated considerably: you walked on the right hand side of the hallway ONLY, single-file, between classes, SILENTLY, and were not to be in the hallways between classes. Teachers roamed the halls between classes with BIG paddles (the wooden “fraternity hazing” type, with holes drilled in them) and simply being IN the halls between classes implies that some teacher had ordered you “out in the halls” and hence you were there in order to be paddled. Those things fucking hurt. You could get it for speaking (at all) in the hallways between classes or being out of line or, again, backtalking any of the teachers.
b) Separation of Church and State — Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, in Georgia between the mid 1960s and 1972 when we left, the Bible WAS a part of the curriculum. Bible readings at lunchtime while we had our heads down on the desks, listening. Class pageants were nearly always Bible-themed. Students came into my Jr High home room in the mornings to witness, telling us about ‘being saved’.
c) Open Campus — At the opposite extreme, in High School we had open campus, meaning that if you chose not to take a course at all 3rd period or 5th period or whatever, that was fine, you could walk off-campus. You could do so during lunch. Step off school property and light up a cigarette. Drive across town to deposit a paycheck. Go up into the hills across the street and roll a joint and smoke it with your friends. Go to your folks’ currently empty with your partner and get laid, I guess, not that I had the opportunity myself.
d) Pocketknives, aspirin, etc—I had a Barlow pocketknife in my pocket for 8-9 years, just a handy tool. Unless I yanked it out and threatened someone or cut someone, no one had any prohibitions or concerns about it. I could also carry around nonprescription meds, take them as I see fit, give them to my friends if they had a headache, etc; some kids had lighters or matches on them most of the time.
e) Violence and Threats of Violence—Kids fought. I got beat up now and then. (Mostly boys). Kids definitely threatened other kids, sometimes in earshot of teachers—might get spoken to with authoritarian condemnation, but it wasn’t cause for suspension or expulsion or anything. Fighting would get you suspended if a teacher came upon the event but they didn’t do shit if you reported it post facto (your word against the other person’s). Kids regularly made indirect threats to teachers and principals: not “I am going to kill you” but singing songs about meeting teacher with a loaded .44 or drawing cartoons depicting decapitation of the teacher and so on and so forth. It wasn’t treated like something that ought to be taken seriously.
f) Sex Specific Dress & Grooming Codes—don’t know if that’s entirely in the past in public schools now or not, but it was certainly a factor for us then. Boys could not have long hair (over the collar) in many (not all) of the schools I went through. One school didn’t let girls wear jeans although they could wear shorts or non-jeans pants. One school would not let boys wear shorts (and in a very hot week one boy protested by coming to school in a skirt, which they’d never thought to prohibit). Something about socks… I think boys but not girls had to wear socks.
g) Pledge of Allegiance—every classroom had the flags up front and the day started with saying the pledge, up through 7th grade when I changed school systems
h) The PA System—the front office could address the whole school via the PA system, or just one classroom; and they could hear the teacher speak back into the thing. They could also eavesdrop on classrooms at random and did so on occasion (remonstrating a noisy classroom when the teacher had stepped out, for instance).
i) Bell and Howell 8mm movie projectors, Filmstrips—This was the audiovisual state of the art. The movie projectors or film projectors would come in on a rolling table for the teacher to use.
I don’t hang around schools to see the class size, but I think it’s always been on an upward trend. Especially in financially crippled California schools. My HS was very atypical so I won’t count that. I was in late 80s/90s.
Zero tolerance - the ones in the news are obviously biased, as they’re not going to report the “student makes a hand gun, shoots friend, teacher tells him to knock it off” stories. But it seems like we got away with a lot more.
Being nerdy - I know a lot of kids are “geeks” these days, which means they wear glasses and can’t wait for the new X-Men, but that doesn’t mean that they’re the type with zero social skills unless the conversation is about Dr Who. I remember begging my parents for contacts, and before that toughed it out with squinting.
I imagine that cursive is less common.
Computers are a bigger part of society. I always hated computer class as a kid, as it was all forced touch typing that I already knew, and sometimes we’d get to play “games,” which were Oregon Trail or Number Munchers, whereas I had hmm… Doom or something at home. Apple IIE, some newer Macs, as Apple subsidized everything. Sometimes, due to class size, you’d have to share, which is stupid. I have no idea how they do it today. They’re learning at a young age, but I think most still have large gaps in their tech skills.
Hark! What malarkey is this! In my day we also had phlogiston and æther, and Science! died when the “scientists” got their hands on it.
When I was in school, from 1990-2002, teachers passed out homework and collected it the next day. Not turning in your homework meant making eye contact with the teacher and making up some stupid excuse.
I have two kids, in second and fifth grades, and they’re expected to leave their homework in a basket in the classroom and pick new worksheets up from a pile of papers. This has proven to be a huge stumbling block for my fifth-grade son. We’ve had to resort to escorting him into the building in the morning, walking him to his room, and watching him put his homework in the basket. At the end of the school day, if he doesn’t have his homework in his hands, we walk him back up to his classroom and make him retrieve it.
The really frustrating thing about this is, we make sure he does his homework every night. These aren’t, for the most part, assignments that he doesn’t do – he does them, but forgets to turn them in! And despite asking the teacher to email me as soon as possible about missed assignments, I only hear from him once every few weeks, only to find out my son hasn’t turned in six worksheets that my wife or I watched him complete at the dinner table. It’s maddening. I get that they want to prepare them for the responsibility of middle and high school, but there has to be some sort of plan to help them when they can’t do that. But the teachers won’t sign an assignment book or post the homework on the Infinite Campus portal every day – they “don’t have time”.
I live in England, so TONS has changed.
I was among the first to take GCSEs, but we didn’t have A* grades, which annoys me because now my As look second-best.
A-levels have become the second stage of qualifications after AS levels. When I took my A-levels, you could take an AS-level as well, but it was considered half an A-level (despite having two-thirds the content as in my German AS level), and few people took them.
Coursework has become more important, then less important, then more, then less, then more, and now it all has to be done in class (or sometimes at the weekend in school) as a “controlled assessment.”
SATs didn’t exist. Our SATs aren’t like the ones in the US; they’re statutory examinations taken by children aged roughly 7, 11 and 14. They got rid of year 9 (age 14) SATs the year my daughter was taking them - though they’d already started studying for them. SATs have made primary school teaching be much more about teaching to the test than teaching for the sake of learning.
There was no National Curriculum when I was young. This change is mostly positive, I think - you can change schools and still keep up, and you can compare schools and teachers more easily.
Speaking of comparing schools, there are now league tables for schools. Schools also get frequent, large-scale checks from the government body Ofsted. “Failing” schools are often closed down - I put “failing” in square quotes because the criteria are not always fair.
When I was a kid, schools were run by the LEA. Even religious schools were mostly bound to LEA rules. Now there are lots of academies, schools run by private companies, who don’t have to abide by rules for length of school terms, pay for teachers, subjects offered, etc. There are also, recently, “free schools,” which are supposed to be parent-led and and pretty much have no rules guiding them at all except ones which affect any workplace. They can employ unqualified teachers, for example. They’re mostly not doing very well.
When I was a kid, there were no statements of special educational needs. Teachers did their best with what they could see in the classroom, with little or no input from psychologists, etc. Many kids who are now mainstreamed went to special schools.
Class sizes were slightly bigger than they are now.
University was free and you got grants unless your parents were rich, and not everybody went. Now you have to pay fees and degrees are required for more and more jobs.
We didn’t have any computers at primary school. I know some schools at the time did though.
IT was a new subject in my GCSE year.
Toilets all had hard, scratchy paper that would slide off your arse. Now they have loo roll that actually works. But it’s more difficult to get permission to actually use the toilet.
A lot of kids started primary school (at age 4/5) with no prior school experience like nursery or play school. That’s extremely rare now.
Schools had a staggered intake for the first year, with intakes in September, January and April. Now most if not all schools take every child in in September.
The school leaving age has increased from 16 to 18. A decade before me, it was 15.
Hands-on subjects like woodwork and home ec actually have the kids sitting down and writing stuff most of the time. Even PE does this in year 11. My daughter hasn’t had to take a PE kit in for months.
Parents can, technically, choose between several nearby schools, rather than just going to the nearest one.
Speaking and listening was introduced as part of English GCSE, then taken away. They took it away after the kids this year had already taken the bloody exam, which is stupid and cruel.
Teachers now, if they’re under 50, all have a four-year-degree or a three-year-degree (the standard for an honours degree here) plus a postgraduate qualification.
Foreign languages are introduced in primary school now; unless your Head particularly wanted it, they weren’t when I was young. However, they’re no longer obligatory after age 14.
Schools have multiple layers of administration, with numerous Heads, Deputy Heads, Assistant Heads, etc etc.
My secondary school headteacher still wore a cap and gown.
Minor changes to the curriculum, exams and coursework happen annually. There are big changes afoot to the core curriculum from next September; the teachers still don’t know what they’ll be required to teach then.
I could go on and on. There’s very little that’s the same and it’s impossible to know what will stay the same in the future.
I started first grade in 1960 (my school didn’t have a kindergarten) so you can just imagine the changes. Plus I was in Catholic school riding the wave of the baby boom - in 5th grade, there were 60 kids in my class, and 3 other classes with almost as many kids - that’s over 200 5th graders. But I don’t recall any major discipline issues - then again, we knew if one of the nuns or lay teachers said anything to our parents, we’d be grounded for life. Parents were more inclined to believe the teachers over the kids.
Naturally, there were no computers, calculators, or even TVs in the classrooms. We did have filmstrips with accompanying records so you knew when to flip to the next picture. We did a lot of writing, and you were graded on content and penmanship (I never got better than a C for my handwriting 
) In fact, all work was graded on neatness as well as content - attention to detail and all that. Lots of memorization - not *always *a good thing, but some things should be memorized.
I went to public school for high school, and for the first time, I didn’t have to wear a uniform. However, the dress code was pretty strict. Girls were not permitted to wear pants, and skirt lengths were policed. No one wore shorts or t-shirts or sneakers (except in PE) or flip-flops. We had gym uniforms - mustard colored short dresses over bloomers - very stylish! :rolleyes: You were required to take 4 years of PE, 4 years of English and Social Studies, and in 9th grade, all girls were required to take Home Ec. Don’t even think of taking shop, tho - that was for boys only!!!
By my senior year, girls could wear pants, but only if they were part of a pant suit and only with a note from home. There are probably lots of other things, but I graduated in '72 - I don’t remember lots of the details. But one biggie I do remember - there was not stupid emphasis on stupid standardized testing - at least not the way it’s used today.
I’m told they’re allowed to use calculators in maths these days.
Oh, uniforms: they’ve always been the norm in English secondary schools. For primary schools, they only used to be the norm for religious schools, but now it’s very rare to find one that doesn’t have them. Primary school uniforms are simple, cheap and practical, though. Well, for state schools - some private school primaries dress their kids up like they’re living in 1912.
In my area of Ontario there is way more French these days. Entirely French schools now which didn’t exist when I was a kid. I started Kindergarten at age 5 in 1978 and French Immersion began the following year. My mom was annoyed because if she knew she would have had me wait and get into that.
Also, kids are starting school younger now, with “Junior” and “Senior” Kindergarten. Also those kindergarten graduations. We didn’t have that.
Same with calculators - we weren’t allowed to use them unless it was for things that actually needed one (sine/cos/tan or whatever.)
It seems they’re also teaching reading differently - we learned to “sound out” words but now kids are being taught to know the word on sight.
I think they’re also teaching a different way of adding, something about counting up by tens along a row.
Way more guns.
I went to a top-tier state University, private Catholic high school, and public elementary and middle schools.
From what I can tell talking to parents of school-age kids and watching the news, the public schools here in Texas have become totally geared toward the state-mandated achievement tests- the concern isn’t so much that the students learn, but rather that they pass the tests fairly well, so that the teachers, administrators, school and district aren’t penalized for poor performance.
It also seems like there’s a lot more blind rule-following with 3 strikes type policies and mandatory punishments being more common today. I mean, when I was in elementary and middle school, I got in quite a few fights because I was big and not a bully, and therefore seemed like someone to be bullied. (but I had been taught how to fight by my grandfather!). I pretty much came out the winner in every fight I had, and never really got in any trouble or had any punishment other than the most token one afternoon of detention type things.
Nowadays, you get suspended just for fighting, even if you’re not the instigator, which seems ridiculous and pussified to me.
College admissions have become more rule-oriented as well with the top 10%/8% automatic admissions rule that the Texas Legislature passed in about 1998. The rule basically is that the top 8% (used to be 10%) of students by class rank in the state are automatically admitted to A&M or UT. The upshot of it is that some 80% of the students at A&M and UT are admitted due to this rule, leaving very little room for discretion on the part of the schools’ admission process. As you can imagine, using class rank is a very inexact and subjective yardstick that excludes a lot of qualified students and admits a lot of unqualified ones. Hell, I’m not even sure that I’d have been admitted back in the day under that rule.
“Now”? Having cap-and-gown graduation ceremonies for kindergarteners was a recurring theme in the Peanuts comic strip in the 1970s (there was a story line where Linus was running for student body president - it was the basis for the TV special You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown - and part of his platform was to get rid of kindergarten graduation ceremonies).
When I went to high school (late 1970s), there were quite a few jokes about how much it looked like nearby San Quentin Prison. Of course, it didn’t have things like metal detectors back then (and, AFAIK, still doesn’t).
Quite a few things that people claim as “changes” were definitely in place in my day… For example, “school is being dumbed down”; when I was a sophomore, my school tried to implement an additional required class in “English grammar through composition” - i.e. do a lot of writing to show that you’re not making basic grammatical mistakes. The intent was that half of the sophomores would take the course in its first semester, and the other half in its second. However, so many students failed the first time that the second semester classes filled with a considerable number of students not being able to enroll for it. Somebody noticed that this backlog was going to get worse before it got better, as next year would have a new group of sophomores in addition to the juniors who either never took the course or failed it (in some cases, twice), and the whole thing was dropped.
I can think of one valid reason for this; it might prevent some kids from trying to “do their homework” by copying it from the Internet.
But “more homework” is another theme that may not be as true as it sounds; even in my day, we had teachers who were under the impression that, “My class is your most important one, so I don’t see why I need to leave time for any other class’s homework”; needless to say, if you had two of these, you had a problem.
No-fail policy, also no giving out a zero on anything. If a student turns in something, even weeks late, the teacher is expected to grade it on it’s merits.
None of which prepares a kid for actual life.
Is that actual policy where you live?
It was certainly the case for me until high school
I was born in 1945, and was in 2nd grade in 1952. I’ve had some wonderful teachers over the years, but I’ll just tell you about my 2nd grade teacher. I don’t think she’d be allowed to teach today. At least I hope not.
Miss G. was painfully thin, and wore the same thing ever day: a starched long-sleeved white blouse and an ankle-length straight black skirt. Her brown hair was in little rings, covered by a hair net. Wire-rim bifocals. High black laced shoes. No makeup. No jewelry. Nobody had ever seen her smile.
She was more of a disciplinarian that a teacher. She would give us an assignment every morning, and you wouldn’t be allowed to eat lunch until you were finished with it. I was very meticulous in my work, so most days I ate my lunch in the bus, on the way home.
In the back of the classroom was the “cloak room,” hidden by heavy doors that lifted up, like garage doors. There was neither light nor fresh air in the cloak room. If a student misbehaved, he had to stay in the cloak room until given permission to come back. The rest of us were instructed to ignore any crying or screaming that came from the cloak room.
Another of her favorite punishments was to not allow the kid to go to the restroom, for the rest of the day . . . then ordering the kid into the cloakroom for going in his pants. It wasn’t unusual for all of our coats to smell like piss or shit.
One PTA meeting, Miss G. told our parents that she hated children . . . especially boys.
I wasn’t the only kid who started having nightmares while I was in Miss G.’s class. These nightmares continued for several years.