Right; I was in college from 1984-88 and backpacks were common on campus. And that fits with the history of the JanSport backpack.
Mid-70s, my dad gave me his old army backpack (a sort of khaki canvas if I remember correctly) to use to carry my books to and from school. It wasn’t a common thing yet back then. I think I was a trendsetter! And yes, my high school had the halls lined with full size lockers in the late 70s.
My kids high school was a typical locker lined building. He started his first year right after covid hit so most of his first semesters were remote. When they eventually went back to in-person lockers were not assigned but optional if you wanted one. He never got a locker for the remainder of high school. With everything done mostly on chromebooks and the lack of text books he never found a need for one.
This may be a little off-topic - but why in the world did you need to carry all those books every day. Did you actually use them in class daily or was there some other reason? I see I didn’t mention it in my post - but I had textbooks, they just stayed at home unless a particular teacher told us to bring in our textbook on Friday.
Yes, the boys in my grade school used them up until I graduated in 1977 - girls usually had some sort of bag ( but not a backpack)
There is something similar in Japan that even borrows the name:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/world/asia/japan-randoseru-backpack.html
The lockers at my high school were grouped together at the ends of the hallway. It was convenient to the parking lots
My junior high had traditional lockers along a very wide hallway. I would grab my textbook while walking to that class.
Yeah. When I was in elementary school I used a “book bag” with a handle. I used a soft-sided canvas haversack or backpack when hiking as a Boy Scout, but not for school (would’ve been a lot easier on my hands if I did).
In high school nobody used book bags, and I walked home a couple of miles with my books in a stack cradled under one arm. That wasn’t any better, especially if I was also carrying my trumpet home from band practice.
There haven’t been lockers at my high school since the 90s. The kids carry very heavy backpacks and most classrooms have class sets of textbooks so the kids aren’t immobilized from the weight. Lockers were too easy to vandalize, either through water or fire. Backpacks are easier to search with a drug dog, as well.
I had a locker, so I didn’t have to carry around all my books all day every day. If I hadn’t had a locker it would have been a pain for me. Life became a little more inconvenient when I started my junior year at the senior high school. There were roughly 2,000 students on a sprawling campus and I only had time to go to my locker three times a day. Depending on my schedule for the semester, there were times I had to carry quite a few books and others where I hardly had any to carry.
As for how often I used books in the classroom every day, it’s been just a little over 30 years since I graduated. It’s been so long I forgot my freshman year was 1990 not 1991. The best I can recall is that I needed them often enough that carrying them to class was a regular habit of mine.
Math and science books were often referenced for problem sets and looking up constants and tables; literature, civics, history, and foreign languages often had reading in class, and of course art, physical education, and similar classes often required additional materials and clothing.
We didn’t have a textbook for microeconomics but by the end of the course I had a 2” three ring binder of notes and handouts which were critical to passing the ‘open book’ mid-term and final examinations, which were the only two significant components of the grade (40% for each, 10% research paper, 5% each for in-class quizzes and participation).
Stranger
Here is a picture of where I went to junior high. Look at the four parallel buildings on the left. The lockers were in the corridors to the right of them. (No lockers between buildings.)
I went to high school in the northwestern corner of Los Angeles County. The classrooms were arranged in three ‘quads’. So, yeah; open air. Our lockers faced the interior, open area of the quads.
That’s passe in the most modern schools. Smartboards/whiteboards have been replaced by Clevertouch devices that have apps and options that would take two full pages to describe. Modern student desks are shaped like triangles because research shows there are more options for shapes/designs.
The best components now, then, and always are students who want to learn and parents who support their schools and reinforce educational values at home. Without that, we’ve see that all the modern tools in the world won’t make a difference.
In high school, we were expected to; textbooks were actively used by our teachers during class. Our school wasn’t very big, and so, we’d go back to lockers between classes, to swap out books (as well as notebooks and folders).
(But, that was 40+ years ago; I have no idea how common that is now.)
What exactly do American students keep in those lockers? The books that they don’t need for the classes on that day? But I’m sure they will, at some point, need those books at home for a homework assignment, so wouldn’t they rather store the books at home?
I stopped by my locker three times a day: once in the morning for the books I needed until lunch, then again to switch out my pre-lunch books for my after-lunch books, then on my way out to the bus and put away any books I didn’t need for homework.
Until high school, when I typically did my homework in homeroom and/or study hall.
For any given class, I would have needed:
- One or more textbooks
- A folder (where papers, like assignments to be filled out, were put)
- A spiral-bound notebook, for taking notes
Also kept in my locker:
- The sport coat and tie that I had to wear every day (Catholic high school): when I got to school, I’d hang up my “outdoor” jacket or coat (if it was cooler or cold weather) in the locker, and put on the sport coat and tie
- A gym bag which had my gym clothes and gym shoes (which got taken home every so often, to wash the clothes)
- The backpack that I wore to and from school; in that backpack, I would transport whatever textbooks, folders, notebooks, etc. I needed for doing homework, as well as my lunch if I packed a lunch that day.
At any given time, most of the above was being stored in my locker.
As I noted earlier, we needed the textbooks on a daily basis at school, which is why they were usually in my locker. If I needed a textbook for homework, it’d go home with me that night, and then I’d bring it back to school the next morning.
We had separate lockers in the gym locker room (changing room near the showers) for gym clothes.
Likewise.
We had a locker room next to our gym, but the “lockers” in that were just open stalls, as it was one small locker room – it was not a big school, and we only had about 300 students, across four years. That locker room was not only used for changing clothes for gym, but also used by the school’s sports teams. We weren’t able to store our personal stuff in that locker room.