“It’s Howdy Doody Time

It’s time to start the show

So kids let’s go!”

1947 seems so long ago and only yesterday. Harry S. Truman is president, Howdy Doody is a TV star, America’s Greatest Generation saved the world and I walked with my first grade classmates to our village common school.

Multi-class grades 1 to 4 was in one room and elementary grades 5 to 8 in another. We practiced listening and speaking; we memorized the basic facts for reading, writing, spelling and math. While second grade was being taught, first grade was watching and getting an introduction while third grade got a reinforcing review.

We studied the meaning of numbers; about how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. We memorized the facts, 2+2=4, and 2x4=8.

Primary school was about LEARNING TO READ. “The most common English words is “the.” It’s on a list that makes up 75% of children’s and 50% of adults reading words. Memorizing the “whole word” was the method used to teach us reading.

An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. The education, for children who didn’t learn all the facts 100% ended at 4th grade.

Grades 5 to 8 were READING TO LEARN. We used primary skills to build our ladder of learning, a multistep framework that focused on science, social studies, math and other subjects.

Our village school was built on a human scale as an extension of the family. Everyone knew our names. Everybody was somebody.

Recess and lunchtime were shock absorbers; where we played off extra energy that we good kids behave badly. On the playground everyone was good at something, but no one was good at everything. We learned to respect each other’s differences.

Big, a simple minded idea, spread through the land like a cancerous growth. The common school once described as America’s greatest idea was small in our age of big.

Big schools, cold impersonal and unfriendly makes everybody equal. Monster schools makes everybody nobody.

Joseph Woitko

Beaver Meadows