Also I was lucky enough to go to a well funded California elementary school in rich neighborhood pre-Reagan. Music was taught by music teachers. Art was taught by art teachers. So they did not increase work loads. On the one hand I know it is incredibly far from what most kids experienced even when I was a kid, let alone today. On the other hand, why shouldn't that be part of what we ultimately hope for, for everybody.
My parents were working class but they wanted me to have a great education. So they researched not only districts but schools, an d moved into an apartment that went to a great elementary school. Did the same when it was time for me to go to high school. Elementary school was kind of paradise for me. High school not so much, because going to a high school where everyone was richer than me offered great academics but was a nightmare in other ways you can probably guess. But elementary school was wonderful. The teachers seemed to have a lot of fun, and it kind of infected the kids. There was a lot of choice - certain things everybody had to learn but other things you picked from a menu. I think the idea was that could learn to write writing about anything -so you pick from this huge variety of electives so that you found something fun for you, but then had to research it and write about it, so that you were really learning research and writing. You thought of it as learning about cars or whatever it was that interested you. It did not mean some of the standards a lot of people talk about on this list. I mean there were mandatory subjects and tests and grades. But still overall it was great. I honestly think most of the kids and most of the teachers enjoyed it. Part of it I think was that while the formal structure was only slightly unconventional, the attitude of the teachers and administration was very unconventional. It was an integrated school (a wealthy African American neighborhood) .
I know when I told my story about the neurological disorder someone said they shoujld have diagnosed right away. Really they did, but the approach they tried was extra tutoring in handwriting rather than substituting typing. But when my Dad suggested that they were very open to it. No school is perfect, but a willingness to listen to reasonable suggestions is no small thing. The teachers were always full of laughter, not only with the kids but with each other. There was a really active PTA, and the parents were heavily involved. And because funding was good, and the parents were supportive, and other factors the administration were not assholes. It did not last - by the time I hit sixth grade was already getting more rigid. And of course working class schools in California did not the same kind of funding or freedom. It was a tiny bright spot in time and space -- where a strange intersection of race and class created a bright spot that was never open to most \people and that could not last. But it was there in Baldwin Hills, the Golden Ghetto, for a moment or two.
I know most of my socialism is probably due to being raised b
socialists. knew how fortunate I was, cause my parents planned very
carefully to get me into an upper class school on a working class
budget. We were two blocks from the border where I would have gone to
a very different school with a very different experience. But we had
an apartment on the right side of the border, and I spent a few years
in paradise. And I always thought how wrong it was being over that
border was what admitted me into paradises. There was no reason
everybody should not be admitted. And even today, long after that
particular paradise was killed, I still think that. There is no
reason everybody should not have access to a earthly, imperfect
paradise. Not intellectually, but emotionally, I think part of what I
am is based upon an imagined citizenship in what a well-known
socialist fantasy writer calls "the Republic of Heaven".
>
>> There is certainly no reason to fill up school hours with
>> cursive. If an obsolete skill is to be taught, what about
>> slide rules or the abacus.
>
>
> I think it's useful to remember that this thread didn't start with the
> Important question of "What shall we teach children?" but rather a sappy
> polemic of "Oh woe is society where we don't teach cursive" ...
>
> /jordan
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