Mark Felt the great Watergate player was asked how he felt when his role became known to the public. He said "all I feel is 90 years old."
I'm of a mind to say "all I feel is 68 years old." Not that I'm terribly handicapped by anything in a literal sense. But my eyes get opened at how our world and day-to-day lives can change so much. People in the real world lifestyle - people who have their recycling container full every two weeks - are faced with confronting and adjusting to these things faster than me. I'm merely a solitary person living out on Northridge Drive in Morris MN.
Much of my fulfillment comes from watching my zinnia flowers slowly come up. Some old people feed the pigeons. What is life like for the so-called "Generation Z?" Well, these people have reportedly never been taught cursive handwriting. As a kid I never heard the term "cursive." We just heard "handwriting" or "penmanship."
Ah, penmanship. We not only learned it, we realized it was going to become essential. Anyone who has studied Civil War history is charmed by how people in those times wrote with a downright flowery touch. Their penmanship was like art. The most hardened generals could write "flowery."
What all has transpired leading to today? We learn that the 2010 Common Core standards wiped out cursive instruction. Leave it to pushy bureaucrats with their trendy ideas and buzzwords, I guess.
I was a victim of the education bureaucracy in the 1960s. Advanced studies got thrust on me that 1) I had great difficulty handling, and 2) I failed to see the relevance of. People in academia would have pooh-poohed you if you said the purpose of education was "reading, writing and arithmetic." They'd come at you like you were some ignorant rube.
Education bureaucrats were given lots of leeway to behave like that then. It was arrogance and largely self-interest. Pushing kids to meet onerous standards would require lots of well-paid teachers. The latter all preferred a system that was taken away from local control and accountability as much as possible. What? We were supposed to let the local rubes and hayseeds have actual power? Well yes.
And it's ludicrous to view the many ordinary local people as ignoramuses anyway.
The bureaucrats and teachers fooled us with their pretenses for a long time. Then the barriers started to fall. Local control with local standards really wasn't so bad after all. "Academia" as it was called retreated. Teachers unions had to be reined in some. Not sure how that was accomplished. A hint was given me once by a former school board member who said, "for the teachers to go on strike today, the whole contract has to be renegotiated." He made it sound like a disincentive to strike.
I am hardly ever annoyed to learn of the activities of teachers unions today. I'd probably consider them accepted as reasonable advocacy. Still I might have a suspicious eye.
"All I feel is 68 years old," alas, so one thing I possess is a pretty long memory. Teacher unions across Minnesota were raising absolute hell and disrupting communities in the early to mid-1980s. It may have started earlier than that, but I wasn't with the newspaper full-time until 1979. In a very short time I came to appreciate what was going on. Maybe if you're younger than me you think I exaggerate.
I'm a what?
I remember very early-on in my newspaper career, getting a little message to my home mailbox that was directed to me as a "community leader." The first reaction might be to feel a little flattered. How could I not? The letter was from the local teachers union and it had absolutely boilerplate hardball union language. The letter pointedly accused the Morris school board of dragging its feet for settling on a contract, the insinuation being that the board didn't want to settle.
Absurd of course. Why wouldn't the board want to get past something like that? Board members are elected and are quite well-meaning people. How could they be so mean as to "not want" to settle? Of course it was union claptrap. Other "community leaders" were in the mix with me.
Even if people were upset with the teachers, what could the public do? Remember the old saying? "You can't fire a teacher?" I think it was more true then than today. I used to have the impression that when a teacher was hired, it'd be a foregone conclusion they'd eventually get tenure. A few years ago I began getting the impression that had changed.
We want reasonable discretion to be exercised on these matters. Everyone believes in fairness, at least the non-teachers do.
Have teachers been straightened out? Maybe. Who doesn't want to like teachers? I certainly want to like them. In the '60s and into the '70s, they made their courses too hard, gave out too much homework.
It was assumed in those days that kids hated school and would click their heels together when learning of a canceled school day in winter. Over time I sensed attitudes changing. It seemed that kids started looking forward to school in the fall.
We used to talk about "summer vacation." Has that term faded away? I mean, because summer isn't really vacation, not when you realize all the structured activities for kids. "All I feel is 68 years old" and I remember when summer was a time to be idle, to enjoy being idle and then to confront some of the boredom that went along with that. Boys my age could get into trouble. Parents didn't seem to supervise their kids well enough.
Those were Cold War times: us vs. the Russians. The threat may have been blown way out of proportion by an education establishment across America that was simply trying to feel its own importance. Wink, wink: pay the education people more. So teacher unions got so powerful in places, they irritated the hell out of nearly everyone.
So, our school board "didn't want to settle" with the teachers? The teachers should have all been told to take a flying leap. We could only imagine that. An ossified education system could be put in the same category as crime, death and taxes.
With time the preferred attitude did in fact break through. Maybe it started with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. "Open enrollment" came along in Minnesota. Was that the main catalyst? Injecting some competitive pressures? Until then our education system seemed a lot like the military. Bulky (to be sure) and unaccountable.
It took years for the public to push back appropriately on the Vietnam war. For a long time our leadership class felt we could fight any war like we were fighting WWII all over again. Such a glorious war, WWII. Except, so much of that is myth. Myth springing from war. How come we didn't give the Soviets their due when it came to crushing the Nazis? The Nazis feared the Red Army more than they feared us. Movies showered us with images of the good guy U.S. soldiers killing Nazis who in most cases were typical scared young men doing what their government required, and influenced by propaganda.
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| "Sputnik" (wiki) |
Let's really try to value the high school diploma and not suggest that college is essential. For a few students it will be. For the rest, knock it off and just get them well-grounded with reading, writing and arithmetic. I sure could have used that sense. But I'm 68 and beyond mapping out anything for my life.
"All I feel is 68 years old." I can relate to the late Mark Felt who was the secretive source in Watergate.
We really ought to make sure our kids learn cursive handwriting. Why not? I learned my penmanship at the old Longfellow Elementary School, west Morris. I learned it way back in the second grade. I use it every day.
Addendum: Lois Burnes was the school board member who wrote a simple rebuttal to the teachers at the time I got the letter I write about here. Ah, "community leader." There would come a time when the teachers/coaches did not want me to be a "community leader." But I always tried to see clearly. I am a Watergate era journalist.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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