Nostalgia and What We Didn’t Know

by Pamela Ayari

“Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.” – from Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

In a predominately white, working-class town, circa 1992, an entire fifth grade class spent the year practicing cursive writing. In the same year, each classroom received its own Commodore 64. There were three Spanish-speaking students, one of whom spoke almost no English. The blacktop had just been refinished, topped off with a colorful United States map painted across half of it. The playground was refurbished with a new set of tires connected together to climb on attached to the splinter covered wooden structure. On short trips to the school’s library, fifth grade students worked on puppet plays and learned about becoming astronauts and zoo keepers. Students’ special activities within the school included music class, gym, art, the computer room, lunch, and the occasional visit to the school nurse. All of the fifth graders were told that their sixth grade teachers at the middle school would not accept any homework not written in cursive.  At the time, the average white, middle- and working-class parent believed that their children needed a “good” education, which meant graduating from high school in order to get a job. In 1992, we all believed that our sixth grade teachers would not accept homework in print. We all wanted to save the planet by recycling. Creativity outside of school was limited, primarily, to Cub Scouts and Brownies. We all stayed away from the small Spanish-speaking part of town.

In 2008, elementary school students type their work at the least and make their work into multimedia presentations at the most. They want to save the planet through corn production, wind mills, and solar panels. Their phones memorize the phone numbers of all of the friends their parents have never met. Creativity within school is curricular. Playgrounds are made of materials covered in “safe”, soft rubber with a regulated 14-inch deep soft ground cover. A cell phone can do what was never imagined for a Commodore 64. Creativity outside of school is dependent on how many activities are scheduled for the child by parents bent on college admissions. Foreign languages are taught daily on Nick Jr, Noggin, and PBS Kids. Given the economic climate, most working- and middle-class parents just want their children to be able to have what they have, but hope that they can figure out how to pay for the higher education that might now entail.

And so I ask of all of this- what world are we preparing our children for? What world did our parents prepare us for? Did our parents and teachers prepare us for global warming, population overload, an economic race with China, fatal viruses, the need for alternative energies, the melting of the ice caps, the need for something more than just tolerance? Did their naivety or ignorance miss the value of lessons on continued discrimination and racism? Did they miss long-standing information on global networks attempting to mirror the power and destruction potential of standing national militaries? Miss the necessity of spending within a budget? Did they miss the potential of so many events that have happened to us in the past two decades? Has public education primarily focused on the positive, the good, and the often times tweaked history of things? Has our desire to teach positively altered our abilities to teach productively and provide students with the wherewithal to critically think, analyze, and rearrange the world around them?  Further, has asking that all students perform to the same traditional standards missed the essence of having a diverse, creative workforce?

I often think back on my participation in the Environmental Club in 1992. We were going to save the world by recycling. How limited that view was- both ours and the teachers who presented us with only that option. Would our time have been better spent by learning Arabic or Chinese? By building small solar powered robots? By inventing? By learning more than another language, but being immersed in our neighbors’ lives?  Educational researchers have argued that literacy has changed in the past one hundred years from something that entailed being able to sign one’s own name to being able to analyze a text to being able to think creatively (Beers). But isn’t that what parents and teachers thought they were teaching their children two decades ago? Four decades ago? Perhaps what was lost in the curriculum was not the idea that thinking outside the box and being creative was a good thing. Perhaps what was lost in translation was that the curriculum had painted such a nice box for students that creativity, or the potential thereof, was left wandering aimlessly.