Here, here!
When I was a kid, we played tag, capture the flag, kick the can, army men, and cops and robbers.
Later, we played baseball in the street (can I tell you how many broken headlights we had in just a few years), football on the beach (trying running like Wesley Walker in sand!), frisbee in the water, "errors" in the backyard.
One year, my friend and I wrote a sequel to Rocky well before Rocky II came out. It wasn't very good, but boy, we had fun doing it.
When we did engage in "electronic things," we listened to albums.
I came remember the first year I started to listen to records. It was 1977 - I was in the fifth grade. My friend's older brother had records by Kansas, ELP, Jethro Tull and Yes. His other older brother was a disco fan and had records by Donna Summer, the Bee Gees (Jive Talkin'!) and others. We listened to all of them. My favorite were the comedy albums - Richard Pryor (Live in Concert), Steve Martin (Let's Get Small!), Robin Williams (Reality - What A Concept) and of course George Carlin (Toledo Window Box and Class Clown.)
I guess I'm getting old, but I feel nostalgic for those days.
There was so much less technology.
There felt like there was more humanity.
The standardized testing was kept to a minimum, playtime and naptime in kindergarten were still around, and we used to get milk and cookies for snacks. We had cigar boxes with the Dutch Masters on them to keep our crayons and glue and other art items in.
Can you imagine kids having such a thing now?
Were things really better in the seventies?
No - but there sure was more time for human interaction.
The days of computers, Blackberries, Iphones, and all the other technological gadgets you see people distracting themselves with have really put an end to so much of the authentic interaction between people.
Even the act of listening to music is so often an individual thing.
I can remember sitting around listening to Class Clown with my friends and everybody laughing.
Who does that anymore?
Everybody is watching their own show on their own personal device and laughing to themselves.
It's not the same.
So I hope this bringing back of playtime works.
We need more spontaneous, imaginative people in the world, and if adding play back into the lives of children can help develop those kinds of kids, that would be great.
...and people hung out by the local, ungated candy store waiting for the delivery of the evening taloids. People like Benny the Junkman, Sammy the Painter, and Irving the cabbie competed with each other with their sensationalized stories. Games like Johnny-on-the-Pony, Ring-a-levio, and punchball passed the time away for the teens. Yes, these were the days when the local foot cop would ask you how your parents were. Households usually contained two parents (and only one who worked). Schoolkids respected their teachers and feared the principal. Noe it is the teachers who fear principals, and kids fear nothing. Problems still existed but we all tried to get along. The Honeymooners, Howdie Doodie and Little Rascals kept us busy at the tube. People tried to be responsible citizens and do the best they could. In today's Age of Anxiety, teachers are preoccupied with oligarchical, head-hunting principals. Geez, how times have changed!
ReplyDeleteOf the many deceptions and hypocrisies of the ed deformers is the canard that they are changing education from the "factory model" to something else.
ReplyDeleteIn reality, they are working to more deeply entrench the factory system in the schools, without mentioning that the office is the new factory, originating and processing information, and with the testing regime as the way of socializing and preparing children for the postmodern workplace, where they will most likely work without benefits or job protections, have every phone conversation listened to, and have every computer keystroke monitored to measure productivity.
Why else are they setting up kindergarten ("children's garden:" if only!) classes with rows of computers instead of play areas?
I was in the fifth grade in 1959. Elvis, the Platters,Ricky Nelson and Jackie Wilson were at the height of their popularity then. I've been feeling a lot of nostalgia for those days lately and I thought it was just that I was old. I agree with a friend of mine who said that probably the only thing he would miss from the present day would be word processing (we are both lousy typists). We worked hard in school, but we had a well-rounded education. We also had music and art classes--and Home Ec and Shop when we got to junior high. We had plenty of time to play after school and during vacations and summers. Most of our teachers gave us a break on vacation--there were no homework packets back then. Our mothers wanted us outdoors where we wouldn't be underfoot. We put sugar near anthills and watched the ants tote it home. We found out that chokecherries and grass don't taste good. We learned a lot just being free and being kids.
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