I just, once again, stumbled across this Kurt Vonnegut quote about public schooling, and thought I’d share:
It’s my dream of America with great public schools. I thought we should be the envy of the world with our public schools. And I went to such a public school. So I knew that such a school was possible. Shortridge High School in Indianapolis produced not only me, but the head writer on the I LOVE LUCY show (Madelyn Pugh). And, my God, we had a daily paper, we had a debating team, had a fencing team. We had a chorus, a jazz band, a serious orchestra. And all this with a Great Depression going on. And I wanted everybody to have such a school.
My father, as it happens, is a Shortridge alumnus. So, I suppose, I’m an indirect beneficiary. More directly, however, I graduated from the public schools in Richmond, Indiana and have rarely, if ever, found myself to be less educated than the others I have encountered, including all of the private school kids from Cleveland and Cincinnati I met when I went to Miami.
That’s why I tend to bristle when people beat the drum about how public schools suck. I don’t know the answer to making sure that more of our kids graduate well educated, but I do know that a good education is available at our public schools. And, it’s not like I went to some top-flight exception to the rule. Richmond High School, at least 18 years after my graduation, was designated as one of ten Indiana “drop out factories” in an AP report.
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Yeah. It’s one of those false “memes” that the cons put out there as part of their ongoing campaign against democracy. And “race-mixing.” And exposure to post-Enlightenment arts & sciences.
Would Mars be good for them? Or is it still too close? We’d be in their gravity well. They could chuck stuff at us. You know, asteroids and whatnot.
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Shortridge wasn’t the only public school that succeeded. It’s hard tracking down just what it was that made it all work, though.
I remember my first day of college, at the commuter school Cleveland State University, and my first class, History 101. I noted a handful of fellow students from my own prep school.
The prof handed out the syllabus, and everyone started poring it over. A couple of hands went up and the prof acknowledged one student, who said, “This calls for 200 pages of reading this week. Is that a typo?”
I looked over at one of my old high school friends. He snickered and winked. We were used to 200 pages in a week. The kids from the public schools were clearly not. The class lost 1/3 of its enrollment before the week was out, as is typical.
This isn’t to say that one cannot get a good education in a public school. However, the standards are lower, and because the parents of public school kids have less skin in the game, they don’t press as hard as, say, mine did, because by God that money could go somewhere else.
In my opinion, it really lies with the parents. I know that public school teachers do their best, but if the parents don’t back the teachers up, and enforce homework and reading in the home, it’s a fairly hopeless proposition.
Could not agree more. My Richmond Community Schools education — especially in history and English — stacked up time and time again against my Penn classmates, who came from private high schools from all over the East Coast and California as well as some of the best-funded public schools in the Mid-Atlantic suburbs. Whatever deficiencies I brought to college were not due to my public school education.
I think this is 1/2 true. I agree teachers to the best they’re allowed to, but I think the discipline that teachers were permitted to use in the past has declined in public schools. It isn’t just lack of parent participation, but parents getting in the way of education by years of complaints about “you can’t do that to MY kid!”
Mike wrote, “I remember my first day of college,…”. You are such a nerd! lol
A government-run entity with tremendous monopoly power (especially over those with less income) is unlikely to be helpful.
But the bigger story: the massive decline of families and the rapid increase in single-parent head-of-households over the last 40 years.
If you’ve volunteered in schools and talked with teachers, you can see and imagine when a critical mass of “difficult students” has not been met or has been exceeded. When you cross that threshold, education increasingly becomes baby-sitting, warehousing, and survival.
From a retired teacher with almost 40 years of classroom experience and continued involvement: the atomsphere back when and now is entirely different. Many great teachers have simply given up on the rules against discipline, against innovation different from what the administration says is acceptable, against teaching this point or that point; and in an age where the students have more access to technology than found in the average classroom–its a different world. Yes, back when I was a high school student my parents stated flatly any problem at school I would receive 2x more grief at home–no challenging the teacher period. My education was in an ill equipped small school where for example the entire chemistry lab was in one drawer of the teachers wooden desk so actually touching things in a college lab was quite an experience and somewhat behind the “big” graduates. But you know what completed the program in 4 years with near honors level while working over 40 hours per week. So public education can only be an excuse for some not a reason.
Richmond High School is not the same place it was back in the day, Doug and Emily. There were a lot drop outs back then, too, but there were enough kids who did well to make people less aware of the number of drop outs. Now, the school system is largely populated by children raised by parents who dropped out or barely squeaked through. Unfortunately, many of those parents do not value education.
My grandparents didn’t have the opportunity to finish school, but they saw the value of education for their children. I’m the furthest thing from a right-wing crank, but the parents today who had opportunities to finish school, but didn’t, don’t seem to value education for their children. I worked as a sub back in the 1990s, and I was appalled by some of the behavior of the parents. Some of it I witnessed; other stuff I heard about from the teachers. I was constantly thinking, “That would have never happened at Joseph Moore!”
Not much else to add. I just remember everyone I knew taking a ton of AP tests and getting fives on like 95% of them. But I think we were just there at the right time. It was a really good group of teachers and really motivated students and involved parents at that time. Knowing that education was the key to our future was enough buy-in for us. I was also really receptive to Mr. Johns’ pep talks about how we were competing against the private schools, and would outperform them. Up until that point, school was somewhere I got out of bed and went to each day. I had never given much thought to the fact that I was being measured against people I would never meet, who had supposed advantages over me.
I had potential, but was a very average, unmotivated and underachieving student up until that point. I lucked out being in Richmond at that time, and the public school really came through for me. What a value. I’m sure many others had the same experience.
I loved Mr. Johns. He was a great teacher. Richmond has changed a lot, unfortunately, not for the better.
I spent most of my growing up years in the Earlham area. Many of the parents of the kids in our neighborhood were college professors, teachers, and other educated professionals. A lot of the kids at Joseph Moore were from that neighborhood, so the school had a lot of good students with dedicated parents. My friends were doing things such as putting on productions of “The Trojan Women” in their back yards. We made up our own versions of games, created our own comic strips, and basically did a lot of nerdy stuff. We didn’t think we were unusual at all.
One of my dearest friends moved away from Richmond after college. She has only come back every once in a while, as both of her parents are deceased now. Her memories of Richmond are pretty much confined to what she knew growing up in our neighborhood, going to Joseph Moore, going to Earlham events with her parents, etc. She just cannot believe it when I tell her about how things are now.
My wife lives there most of the time now, and says she’s noticed a big decline. More stray dogs, etc. More down-and-out looking crowd at the westside stores (what few of them there are anymore).
I grew up in Hidden Valley. Spent a lot of time on those big pipes over the creek behind Earlham Cemetery and all over that woods, in the early 1980’s.
T: we lived on the Earlham Drive side of that part of town. My family moved away in 1977.
I always tell people that we had farm life without the farm. Our house had fields on two sides of it, plus Earlham’s horse pasture. We fed grass and carrots to the horses. On nice days, small planes and sometimes gliders would come to the area. There was just about every bug, animal, or wildflower you could think of in and around our house.
My best friend and I frequently went to Earlham Woods for picnics. We also used to hang out at the Yokefellow building, which Earlham kept unlocked on the weekends. We never did anything destructive, just got Grape Crush or Cherry Crush from the pop machine and read Peanuts paperbacks in the library. We thought we were so cool, lol! One of the neighborhood legends had my brother carrying a neighbor boy from the Earlham Woods back to civilization after said friend fell off one of those pipes. I don’t remember that incident at all, but my older sisters do, and love retelling it.
Now it is hard to go back there because the wild, colorful, expansive world of my childhood is dingy, run-down, paved-over, and small. The fields are covered with tennis courts and new(ish) houses; the corn/soybean/wheat field has become a baseball diamond; Yokefellow is now a dormitory; the horses are no longer let into the pasture. Some of the decay and changes are due to the natural aging of the structures and Earlham trying to neaten up its once undeveloped properties. Some of the change is because the area, and Richmond in general, is not as prosperous as it once was.
I hear you. I just went back yesterday. The meandering creek through our neighborhood is being “improved” into a long, straight, gravel-lined ditch. A lot of the woods I walked have been knocked down for a subdivision. The biggest thing on my old side of town (we lived in the area behind the old Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant) is a huge pawn shop.
There was some controversy about the improvements in Hidden Valley, but supposedly the new drainage ditch was needed. To my knowledge, drainage was not a problem on Earlham Drive, but the part of the creek that ran from Earlham Drive, past the horse pasture, and into the woods, was filled in years ago, possibly around the time Earlham relocated its tennis courts to Earlham Drive. The tennis courts are very near where the creek once was.
The west side of town no longer has much to offer in terms of shopping or restaurants. A number of the stores and restaurants that were there have closed down. Aldi, The Cox’s bakery, Cox’s grocery, Video Town, County Market/Cub Foods, Burger Chef/Hardie’s, and Miller Cafeteria are some of the businesses that have relocated to the east side, closed down, or sold out to other firms. Development in Richmond, such as it is, is concentrated along the 27 North corridor and on the far east side on US 40.
Hey, the west side did get a Timmy’s, eh?!?
Really we grew up in the cultural heyday of Richmond. I think back on memories of things that the school could not hae provided but by luck of where we lived we got that “secondary” education. Things like spending an evening at our next-door neighbor’s house with one of Carl Sandberg’s daughters; or having the prime minister of Bermuda visit our house(he was a pen-pal of a fmily friend). Not to mention being in numerous opera productions with the Combo’s, etc. And then the nature aspect of living in Hidden Valley…with the creeks and the fossils.
I was lucky! As were many of the Richmond kids of the ’80’s-I see it when I read what my friends are doing on Facebook. We had a majority of great teachers who really cared about us-Mrs. Risinger not in that group-but more than that we had opportunities to EXPAND our horizons.
I hope my kids are getting the same things out of life I got. We’re in a great school district-Lake Central-but even though we’re near Chicago-I fear they’re missing some of what I got in life-purely by accident of where I was and when I was living…
Pila, next time I’m in town I’d like to meet for coffee and chat about the “good old days;-)”
T–It was fun spending a few hours with you on Saturday. Hope you enjoyed the pizza. Also your visit to Joy Ann Bake Shop.