A Child of Consolidation |
table of contents |
By
Marjorie LeClair
I was a child of consolidation. I started to school when I was four because
I was an aggravating child from whom my mother needed relief. My first three
years were in a one room school house with students through the 8th grade. I think this gives me some insight into consolidation. It is not all good nor all bad (is anything ever?). For that age, my situation was good.
Upper class people taught us letters, what they stood for, how to string them together to make a word and how to string the words together to make a sentence - thus the magic of written communication.
They also held the magic of numbers. How to make them, what they meant and how to manipulate them to communicate to people how many or how much of a thing. Since we had ears that heard and eyes that saw, we also got the benefit of what the upper grades were taught.
Consolidation became a fact and for the 4th grade and thereafter, I went to the school in town. There I enjoyed playground equipment. For those coming in from the country, it was a Disneyland. Academically I was ahead and bored, but at least saw band instruments and learned to dance the minuet. By the 6th grade I was starting to learn more.
For my older sister it was different. They had started to fall behind academically, had no exposure to the arts, organized sports, nor some of the equipment they were using. They especially were behind in math. Their foundation in the basics were superior, but by the time a child is in the 8th grade they should have had some higher math exposure. The experience was intimidating. (continued below)
The meteor impact which ended the reign of the dinosaurs,
the KT event, was enormous. It struck with the force of 100 million megatons.
If you exploded one Hiroshima sized bomb for every person on earth today,
you would still be about a billion bombs short of the size of the KT event.
The event wiped out seventy percent of all life on earth.
So
what does a one room school house have to do with consolidation today? There
is a parallel. Young children may benefit from the community school with more
emphasis placed on the three R's and less on cutting and gluing. Older children
need exposure to learning that a small school can't afford. They don't need
to be in college chemistry and not know what a Bunsen burner is. This later predicament was my personal experience. The ideal seems to me a dual system, but if we need our money for bombs more than education, then consolidation is necessary.
When will we ever learn that throwing money at a problem will not make it go away. Education needs respect more than it needs money. Schools are thought of more as social clubs than places where one becomes educated.
Our lack of education is merely a reflection of society's values. We say we value education, but try trading a football coach for a Latin teacher and see how far you get.
When Bach died, he was buried in a cemetery in Germany. As
people passed his grave site, they could hear his music being played backwards.
Do you know why?
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He was decomposing!
Contributed by Joe Barda
Do you know why?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
He was decomposing!
Contributed by Joe Barda