09/10/2026
Ah, the good old days of public education! 📚🇺🇸
Every now and then, someone suggests that American schools should just go back to doing things the way we did in the 1950s. You know, back when schools were supposedly better, students behaved, and everything was simpler.
Well, let's take a little trip down memory lane, shall we? 🚗
☢️ School safety: We practiced surviving a nuclear explosion by crawling under our wooden desks. Apparently, those desks were constructed from some remarkably durable material.
👩🍳 Career readiness: Girls could take home economics to prepare for their futures as wives and mothers. Boys took shop class because, naturally, women would never need to operate power tools or earn a living.
🚬 Student wellness: In later decades, some high schools - including mine in Salina in the early 1980s - actually had designated student smoking areas. Nothing says a well-rounded education quite like a cigarette between algebra and American history.
🛻 School security: In some communities, students drove pickup trucks to school with hunting ri**es hanging in the back windows. Nobody thought much about it. Today, we have entirely different conversations about fi****ms and school safety.
📖 Curriculum: We taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. We also conveniently left out quite a bit of American history that made people uncomfortable. And students with disabilities? Many weren't even guaranteed access to public education.
💻 Technology: The height of classroom innovation was an overhead projector, a filmstrip, and a teacher who could operate the mimeograph machine without turning purple. The thought of a computer was science fiction.
And here's the thing: Those schools were educating children for a world that no longer exists.
Today, Wichita Public Schools serves approximately 45,000 students in a large, diverse urban district. Our educators are expected to teach rigorous academic standards starting in kindergarten, integrate technology, address learning differences, support students experiencing trauma, provide special education services, respond to mental health needs, prepare students for careers that didn't exist a generation ago, and keep everyone safe.
And somehow, they're supposed to accomplish all of that in aging buildings, with limited resources, while being told that schools were perfectly fine 70 years ago.
I've spent over 30 years in classrooms. I still spend time in schools. I can assure you that educating children in 2026 is not the same job it was in 1956 - or in 1991 when I started my teaching career.
Nostalgia is not an educational policy. And a wooden desk is not a nuclear fallout shelter.
We can appreciate the past without pretending it was perfect. We can respect the generations who came before us without insisting that today's children should settle for yesterday's opportunities.
Our students aren't growing up in the 1950s. They're growing up in a complicated, rapidly changing world, and they deserve schools equipped to prepare them for it.
The goal of public education isn't to recreate the good old days. It's to prepare children for better days ahead.
And frankly, I think our Wichita students deserve more than a filmstrip projector and a lecture about how good we used to have it. 😉
