politics and lit again

[David Casseres]

When I was in high school in LA (class of '58), the minimum age for
quitting school was 16.  At that age a large fraction of the students
disappeared, and got jobs.  Because in those days you could get a job
without a high school diploma.  A good enough job to be attractive to
a lot of kids.

Of those who remained, a large fraction had no intention of going
beyond the high school diploma, and therefore did not take the
college-bound curriculum, majoring in, say, auto shop or home
economics.  Their prospects were even better than those of the
dropouts, with the potential of rising through the ranks of a company
and entering management.  It wasn't uncommon.

For those bound for college, the entrance requirements were much, much
lower than they are today.  And in college, the requirements for a
bachelor's degree were much lower too.

The net effect of all of this was that my generation had a helluva lot
more free time and energy than kids today.  It went in a lot of
directions: cars, sex and early marriage, rock'n'roll, jazz, folk
music, poetry, vagabondage, military enlistment, entrepreneurship,
kerouackery, etc. etc.  We didn't know about drugs, mostly.

Today's kids (well, the middle-class one I know about) are heavily
regimented.  And so, of course, the ones who break away or fall away
do so much more spectacularly than my old classmates, who merely
drifted away. And so, they seem much more frightening and scandalous
to their elders.


On 9/30/06, Will Layman <WillLayman at comcast.net> wrote:
> As a high school teacher who's here on the list, let me add a few notes:
>
> Despite the continual feeling among older people that the younger
> generation is going to hell (see, natch, Elvis/The Twist from the
> 50s, rock 'n' roll generally from the 60s, etc, right up to hip-hop
> in the 90s and onward), kids today are pretty much the same as they
> ever were.  They still mostly don't like to do homework, and they
> still get plenty of it.
>
> In fact, I'm pretty sure that kids get MORE homework these days, and
> that the general pressure to perform, to get into college, and all
> that is ramped up to a fever pitch.  MORE kids take calculus in high
> school now than before, and MORE kids take the AP English exam --
> which requires them to read lots of great books and write lots of,
> um, essays.
>
> There probably are more goofy-sounding or groovy assignments -- like
> casting a play with celebrities -- but I'm not sure that it's a bad
> assignment (particularly for a 7th grade class) if it gets a
> discussion of the work going.  You hope that the teacher assigns some
> more traditional work too, but non-traditional education is generally
> a good thing -- even when it makes for an easy target in isolation.
>
>  From a Pynchonian POV, you can certainly see how an education that
> considers movies and popular culture as well as the stone cold
> classics is important.  Besides, I'd argue that it's the analytic
> skills that matter more than the substance anyway.
>
> Go kids!  Go teachers!  Go rock 'n' roll!
>
> -- Will
>
> On Sep 30, 2006, at 2:43 PM, Ya Sam wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >
> >> create a collage using Victoria's Secret catalog photos.
> >>
> >
> > Sorry, have not been keeping up with the secondary/high school
> > education these days. Do they still write, hmm, essays?
> >
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