In english class they didn’t watch TV or put on plays. They learned phonics and grammar and had spelling drills every day. They learned to sound out words and use grammar correctly. That meant that they could read and communicate properly. They read age appropriate books and of course they read the newspaper.

In geography and history they learned first about the geography and history of their local community, then their county or region, then their state/province, then their country and their country’s relationships with other countries and finally about the world and its history and geography. In that way they became knowledgeable about their own surroundings and developed a curiosity about the world, which they satisfied by using their reading skills to broaden their understanding of their world.

Same thing in classes like biology — they went out into the field behind the school and collected plants and bugs and learned how to classify them and related them to their local geography and history. So their education started with specifics and went to generalities and built on strong understanding of basic reading, writing and math.

To be fair, they had some advantages that students today do not have. Changes were not as rapid as they are now. They could focus on local issues because they didn’t know about stuff like catastrophes in Asia for days after they happened. We are swamped with information and we do not know what is important and what is not, so we do not know where to focus. TV has encouraged a decline in children’s ability to focus on something for longer than 3 minutes.

Technologically, they had less to learn. Whole fields of study had not be developed yet. The education system concentrated on the 3 “R” ‘s — reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmatic and not on the stuff that kids are taught these days.

If you give a child the tools to learn, then as they get older they will learn on their own. We don’t do that — we try to teach everything and end up teaching nothing.

So that takes care of education — the other thing is that employers expected to train a worker and keep that worker for the whole of their working life – 20, 30, 40 years. They made investments in workers and it paid off for our economy. These days, there is little employer loyalty and of course that means that workers feel little loyalty to their bosses. A person will change jobs every 2-4 years. So employers want people who are already educated — and with as much education as possible — so they do not have to invest in them.

So there are a couple of reasons. There are lots more and I suggest that you talk to your grandparents and older relatives and ask them what they learned in school. You would be surprised! My grandfather went to grade 8. He took Latin and started Greek in grade 8. He took english composition and grammar and literature. He took history, geography, science, math and phys.ed/shop. Music and art was compulsory. He was in school 8 hours every day Monday to Friday (except the summer holidays and time at christmas). Spring break did not exist. There were not many ‘professional development’ days. He had homework every night. And if he didn’t do his homework, he got the strap.

My child attended school 6 hours a day with time out for lunch. She took 1 english, no other languages, history/geography was a combined class and had math and science classes 2 days a week. In addition to 2 weeks at christmas, 1 week in the spring, 10 weeks in the summer, she has all statutory holidays and the teachers do not do any teaching on the Friday before the holiday. She gets 10-15 ‘development’ days. Her teachers cannot maintain discipline in the classroom so what she learned depended on how bad some ofthe other kids were that day. She’s never had homework.

It makes a big difference

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