The Traditions that Shaped School Through the Generations

If you have had a grandparent or been a grandparent, you’re familiar with the phrase “back in my day…” followed by some story about how much things have changed. In some ways, the world has changed so drastically that our day-to-day lives look nothing like those of generations past. For example, it's remarkable how many people in my grandparents' generation managed to find the worst route to school as it was uphill both ways, at least that's the way they remembered it.

My son starts preschool this year, and I know that school will be wildly different for him than it was for me. It got me wondering how much has changed over the last 100 years. As families like mine prepare for a new school year, it’s interesting to reflect on how culture has shaped school through the generations.

My grandparents were born in the mid-1920s, putting them in primary school right around the time of the Great Depression. Back in the 1920s and 30’s the education system wasn’t as regulated as it is today.

There were little schoolhouses in each community and when the stock market crashed in October of 1929, small communities were virtually leveled by financial loss. When budgets were cut, some schools would have to close leaving families out of options. When, eventually, the Great Depression ended, the country learned a lesson about the importance of centralized school systems and education in American became more efficient and curriculums became more standardized as a result.

By the mid-1940s, we were bouncing back from the financial collapse and the end of World WarII. Unemployment was at a record low, spirits were lifted, and people were ready to spend their money. From this time of renewed prosperity, traditions were born that came to define a generation of students. One tradition made popular in this era that still reigns supreme today is prom. The concept of prom (short for promenade) dates back as early as the late 1800s, co-ed groups of college students would dine together to practice their etiquette and social skills. But by the 1940s and 50s, it was cemented as an activity that defined high school culture and still does to this day.

Like American culture, the standardization of education was like a pendulum that, over the decades, would continue to swing, and by the time my mother was a student in the 1960s and 70s she remembered school being very regimented. Her last name was Tozer and the teachers always had students sit in straight rows, alphabetically. This meant she was always in the back, which to her was the perfect place to read a book or gossip with her friends. One day the teacher got so sick of my mother interrupting class that she broke with protocol and moved her to the front of the room. The upside was that she was able to see the board and focus on the teacher whether she wanted to or not.

During this period, under the presidency of John F. Kennedy, there was a change in the way the American public viewed education. The government pushed for an increased focus on race equality in schools based on the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision. This, as you know, wasn’t universally popular but it came about around the same time that educational researchers began encouraging teachers to develop students' intellectual curiosity rather than teaching by rote as my mother remembered.

In the late 1970s, things like the draft, the return of Prisoners of War, and the more than 58,000 American deaths that resulted from the Vietnam War, had a tremendous cultural impact on American students. On one hand, it was traumatic, while simultaneously it was the fire that empowered a new counterculture movement called the hippie movement. Hippies saw mainstream culture as the source of many of our country’s problems. Their protests, sexual freedom, and drug use were a far cry from the promenades that were happening in generations before them. The pendulum of American culture had swung toward the liberal side and even schools felt the impacts.

Everything changed in the 1980s when computers made their way into public schools and MTV blasted popular music videos into American homes. Around this time the cultural pendulum swung again. The hippie movement fizzled out and conservatism raged in earnest. There were still proms, homecoming parades, and high school football games, but suddenly the world was opening up. The brat pack was defining high school stereotypes and young people could see themselves reflected in a way they may not have before.

I was born in the early ’80s and was a student in the 90s and early 2000s. I am a proud member of the floppy disk generation. We had access to computers,

Some big things happened when I was in high school. The Columbine shooting took place in 1999. Who could have imagined how common mass tragedies like that would become? Later that year we all panicked about the Y2K bug and whether the internet would crash when the new millennium began. The following year, when I was a senior, something happened that I vividly remember changing everything. We all remember where we were on September 11, 2001. That event changed everything, for all of us.

Today’s students have a school experience that is hard to relate to. They hold access to the entire internet in the palm of their hands. When the pandemic started they attended classes virtually, something we never could have imagined a decade ago. They wore face masks for hours on end, and high school seniors missed their proms and graduation ceremonies. The last few years were hard for students, but then I think about my grandmother who attended school during the Great Depression and my mother who witnessed school segregation, and I realize that each generation has our own stories that define our education.

My son starts preschool in a few weeks and I can’t help but think how fortunate we are to live in a country where education is a right for all of us. I know his education will be much different than mine was. He’ll never know the joy of ripping the ends off of dot matrix printer paper, he’ll never use a landline phone, and unlike his grandmother and great grandmother, he’ll never have to attend school in the south without air conditioning. Through thick and thin, we continue refining education to provide a better, fuller experience to our kids than what we had. I hope no other generation has to live through a financial collapse or a pandemic, but if history teaches us anything, they’ll experience a disruption of their own. Then they’ll push forward, into their wild and wonderful lives, filled with stories to tell their grandchildren about the time they had to attend school as a hologram, or in a spaceship, or, well, who knows?

Adrienne Freeland is a freelance writer who specializes in helping business owners communicate more clearly. Using skills developed in her former career as a professional fundraiser, Adrienne collaborates with her clients to craft engaging, targeted content.