Today Is My Wife’s Birthday.

It seems that every birthday she or I have is a time to remember the good parts of our long time on this earth. Yesterday my mother and sister came over to help celebrate. Children and education, both past and present, were one of the discussions. Being an old guy, in most of my classes, I was one more than 40 kids and we all learned to read and write. Teachers seemed to view their careers as a calling, though there were good and bad teachers. Their income was similar to the rest of the community. Today, the class sizes are a fraction of what they were and teachers are paid much more than most Americans. Sadly, fewer children learn to read and write proficiently and many more never graduate.

The problem with education today is not money, or the lack of it. In fact, Americans spend more money on education than any other nation. It’s not the teachers either. There are still good and bad teachers. It’s not even the politicians, though they really don’t help with their rhetoric.

The real problem is the way our society has evolved. When I was a kid, in the late 40’s and through the 50’s, creativity was an important part of our lives. We listened to the radio. Yes there was music, but there were great dramas that stimulated our brains with sound effects. Television was all new, so everything was experimental. Mysteries didn’t start by showing the crime and criminal. They challenged the viewers to find clues and try to solve the crime before the on-screen detective. News came from newspapers, and it was news, not opinion. Movies, whether westerns or cop shows, were all good vs. evil plays. Automobiles were new each year, and they didn’t all look alike. When we played, almost anything could become whatever we needed. A chunk of concrete could be third base. A stick could be a rifle or a cane or even a horse.

You see, we all participated in life, we had to work at it and it was fun. Today most movies and television shows are merely voyeuristic experiences. Radio is loud. News is hard to find. I know that newspapers, television and radio all claim to deliver the news. Most deliver their own controlled opinion of what news events mean, in an attempt to help keep us from forming our own thoughts. Automobiles all seem to look alike. When a new model is introduced it’s not really new. It’s a remix of a competitor’s design, which was a confusingly similar reproduction of still another competitor. Oh yeah, a stick is now something you poke your eye out with so they’re illegal.

Technorati Tags: