Schools, then-and-now

I counted the number of students who were in the same 3rd grade class I was in back in 1969-1970.

There were 38 students and the picture-frame had 15 blank spaces. That suggests that somewhere there were classes with  53 students in them.

Preposterous?

It was a different era. There were lots of kids. High schools in the Cleveland, Ohio area were running two-shifts because they could not build new ones quickly enough.

Most families were two-parent families. I only knew of one kid who "didn't have a dad" in my class of 38. That number was skewed because it was a Catholic school and Catholics believed, at the time, that divorce was as shameful as getting caught with hookers (Matt 5:32).

The teachers had standards and they expected you to toe-the-line. 

If you caused a problem in school, the teacher had a great deal of authority to "handle it" right then-and-there.

And if word got back to your parents that you had been disruptive, dad would-and-did whip your butt as soon as he came home from work. For one thing, your parents paid MONEY to send you to a Catholic school. While $200 dollars a year might not sound like a lot of money today, you could buy a brand-new, VW Beetle for $1995 dollars in 1969 so sending one kid to Catholic school was 10% of the cost of a new car.

There were fights on the playground but there were no knives pulled or tire-chains employed, at least at the grade-school level. I think the teachers were practical enough to realize that boys have a different way of establishing pecking-order than girls and they let us sort it out.

Today

Today, there is EXTREME pressure to not touch a child. God forbid that you should paddle them.

Today, there is EXTREME pressure for schools to not suspend kids. The thinking is that the SCHOOL is endangering the child by suspending them if they live in a single-parent home. If mom is working, then kid will be unsupervised and, somehow, that is the school's fault.

One principal told me that they were forbidden by the school board to suspend a kid for more than 10 days in a single school year. FORBIDDEN!!

The kid could bring a weapon to school and the principal could not drop-kick them out if they had already hit their ten days. They could assault a teacher. They could sexually assault another student in the rest-room. They could do drugs on school property...and the teacher and the administration's hands were tied. Oh...and don't even think about reporting it to the police.

In many places, class-loads are restricted to 25 kids or fewer per classroom. And it doesn't make any difference. 

The kids have this all figured out. The good ones still learn. The bad ones...well, without guard-rails they go flying off into bad places.