I had coffee with a friend from high school this morning. We had reconnected shortly before our 20-year high school reunion a few years ago and since then have kept in touch via social media. Despite the divergent paths our lives have taken – she’s a suburban mom while my sole dependent is an ill-tempered cat – we had plenty to discuss beyond the small talk that one might typically find among high school classmates.
My friend is quite proud to declare herself the “mean mom” because her children, ages 11 and 9, don’t have cell phones, and she has no intention of purchasing them anytime in the foreseeable future. “They grow up too fast already,” she explained.
I couldn’t agree more. On the way home, I thought about what life was like when I was 11, back when Mayfair Mall had an ice rink and I was allowed to walk around the mall completely alone. Today, that wouldn’t even be a question.
Yes, life was definitely different back then. Every now and then, I find myself longing for the good old days when being a child was less complicated. More easygoing. Safer.
Apparently, I’m not alone in my love of the past. Check out this letter from Karl Aldinger that recently appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Certainly, one must respectfully consider the generational perspective from which the author (presumably in his 80s) wrote this piece. What scares me, though, is that while the specifics that he cites may be different, there are plenty of people in our contemporary society who would find his suggestions to strip our schools to the bare bones to be entirely reasonable.
Aldinger suggests that schools do without guidance counselors and psychologists. I wonder how many more empty seats I might have had in my classroom over the years, had these gifted professionals not been there to support students through personal crises and depression that I could never even imagine.
Another idea Aldinger presents is that there be no academic support teachers to assist students with learning and organizational difficulties. While this may represent an additional investment, it’s far preferable to the days when those students were tossed into the proverbial deep end of the pool and pejoratively referred to as “retards” by insensitive classmates who had the good fortune not to experience such learning challenges.
And I wonder how two hearing-impaired children I know would fare without the benefit of the speech-language pathologist’s services.
We’re in a different world today, and teaching is far more challenging because of myriad external factors in the lives of our children. Schools are being asked to do far more than teach, and they will continue to do so as the fabric of our society changes.
Yet while our society has changed, our schools have also evolved and they are now serving more students in ways that wouldn’t have been possible even 20 years ago.
Perhaps this evolution is unsettling to some who would like a more “back to basics” approach. But then I consider the students I’ve had over the years, such as a young lady with learning disabilities who is now teaching students of her own, a boy whose personal struggles eclipsed his intellectual prowess for a time, and a girl with severe vision and processing impairments who still graduated with well-deserved honors.
There’s no shame in romanticizing the past, but not to the exclusion of the many positive aspects of the present and the promise of even more in the future.
“What through youth gave love and roses, Age still leaves us friends and wine,” Clement Clark Moore (1779-1863), National Airs. Spring and Autumn, St. 1. 
