Another School Year ... Already?

I see on Facebook that some schools are starting this week (or have started). Early August!?! Oh, how times have changed.

As I posted here the other day, when I was a kid, school started the day after Labor Day, ended right after Memorial Day. That greatly expanded as I went through school, both as a student and a teacher. When I retired from public school teaching in January 1997, we were beginning in late August, ending in mid-June.

I'm not sure why this expansion exists. To make provision for snow days? To allow more in-service time for teachers? To accommodate longer vacations?

That's something else that has changed--vacations. When I was a student, there was none of this two-weeks-at-Christmas stuff, no week (or more) for spring break, etc. Thanksgiving was Thurs-Fri. Christmas was usually a week (depending on its position that year in the weekly calendar). Spring break? Didn't exist. We got Good Friday and--if we were nice--Easter Monday.

And we walked 10 miles to school each way, snow up to our armpits, even in May ... you know?

I've often thought in recent years about how I really could not make it as a teacher in this era of Test-Test-Test. As I've mentioned here before, my elder grandson (about to enter 8th grade) has already taken more standardized tests than I did, K-Ph.D. That seems a little ... excessive ... doesn't it?

And when it's not just kids that the tests supposedly measure but teachers, schools, school districts, well, I'd say that things were generally Out of Whack.

Diagnostic testing, I'm all for (within reason). But endless rounds of achievement tests? Pointless. Destructive.

The scores become all anyone cares about. This began to happen before I retired--the Ohio Proficiency Tests were rearing up like the Kraken to dominate the curriculum. And many people--kids, parents, teachers, administrators--realized this, and very quickly so: that if the scores are what really matter out there, well, then, let's get those damned scores up! No matter what!

And so, over the decades, education has been morphing into test-preparation. And I'm reminded of Dickens' novel Hard Times, serialized (and published as a book) in 1854. The novel begins with this speech (to a teacher) by Thomas Gradgrind, who runs a "model" school:

‘Now, what I want is, Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!’

The teacher is the aptly named Mr. M'Chokumchild.

And, oh, what a dreary, dreary place this school was. And is--for Gradgrind's philosophy has emerged, for the nonce,* as the one we've decided to embrace in our own public schools. And so our children, like the schoolboy to whom Jaques alludes in As You Like It, are "whining" and "creeping like snail unwillingly to school" (2.7). Where it's once again time to, you know, prepare for the test. For that's what education is, isn't it? Choking our children?

*My friend Chris, who's from the U.K., told me yesterday that nonce has a slang meaning in England. I checked it out in the OED, and here's what I found: It dates to 1971 and means ...

A sexual deviant; a person convicted of a sexual offence, esp. child abuse.

That's not good ... but I, of course, was using it in its more common (here) meaning (which goes back to about 1400):

For the particular occasion; for the time being, temporarily; for once.

Still, thanks to Chris, I'll be more careful about how I use the word--at least for the nonce.