The general decline in standards today

[Dennis Young]

I agree Lizzie. That's a good idea. I also blame the entertainment media as well.

 

[Dennis Young]

When I went to school, "swats" were always available if we stepped too far out of line. And I saw them administered by 1 teacher or principal always with an adult witness. And I received them once myself. And we all survived and nobody was injured beyond their pride.

And if we got paddled at school, there was every bit the possibility that we would get in trouble again once we got home. There was next to zero chance that our parents would go roaring up to the school and raise hell with the teacher or principal that we had gotten punished (or threaten to sue).

If ya ask me, the removal of corporate punishment from schools can be credited as a giant step leading to the chaos that has become public school environments today.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Here here! I got a couple of swats too. And I wasn't the only one. But in my day, though we had the occasional teacher we didn't like, we would NEVER have done some of the things I see happing to teachers now. I recently saw one kid body slam a substitute teacher to the floor...a man in his 70s (I think). Also heard of another 1st grader headbutting a teacher.

The sad fact is that you cannot rely on 'Good parenting' to keep kids in line because so many just dont get good parenting. They know nothing of discipline or respect for any authority figure. All to often you have parents who take attitude 'don't you touch MY baby'.

Thus often their kids are wild and don't know how to act.

 

[Dennis Young]

Respectfully, I don't think the automobile has anything to do with it. There were automobiles in the 40s and society was much different then than now.

I place a LOT of the blame on the hippy generation, when kids began to reject their parents' values. Flower power, following people who encouraged teens to 'tune in, turn on, and drop out'. Heck, has just what a kid wanted to hear! Disregarding their parents warnings they began to experiment with drugs, free sex, and threw out any respect they had for themselves...as well s for anyone else.

How did that affect us today? Those teens grew up, then had kids they instilled with similar (lack of) values, and those kids had kids, etc. The hippy generation got older and became (unfortunately) the leaders of our society today. That's why a lot of social issues today are in the news. These issues were important o that generation and e now being pushed.

Again, I fully realize that no generation as perfect and a lot of things happened "in the good old days" that happen today. But it was different BECAUSE it wasn't as publicized. It wasn't so much 'in your face' as it is now. There were some unwed mothers in those days, sure. But there was a stigma attached to it and most seemed to care more about their reputation than they do these days.

And back then, men seemed to care more about their own reputations....they wouldn't be caught dead jobless if at all possible. Today it seems like many men don't care if folks think they are deadbeats.

Here's another thing. Men used to tip their hat to a woman. They held the door open for her. Heck, they offered their hand to help a woman in those days. Most did anyway. When's the last time you saw this in real life? Only in old movies. Today a man will push ahead of a lady to get out of the rain before her, or take a cab away from her.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I get doors held for me reasonably often. And I hold doors for people myself if the circs require. The extinction of door-holding is very much exaggerated.

I honestly couldn't care less about hat tipping -- I see no social advantage to it whatsoever. Token courtesies like that have always struck me as empty and pointless. I'd rather see that man push his hat back, throw his coat aside, and help me shovel my snow or hold the ladder for me while I clean my gutters.

My father was never a hippie. He was too old to be a hippie. He wasn't part of that generation. He was an Air Force veteran, even. He was also was a shiftless, lying, thieving, unemployable bum who couldn't keep his pants zipped up. But at least he wasn't a hippie.

As far as corporal punishment in the schools go, we got the metal side of a ruler across the knuckles in the first grade if we cut up rough, and maybe got pulled out of the recess line by the ear if we were clowning, but there was no such thing as paddling in my era, not around here. The only time I ever saw a teacher actually get physical with a student was in the seventh grade, when a kid went at one of the teachers. Said teacher slammed his head thru a sheetrock wall, and then threw him down the stairs to the principal's office. If that kid had parents who had cared, they probably would have said something, but he didn't. He dropped out of school in the tenth grade and committed suicide a couple years ago at the age of fifty.

 

[sheeplady]

When I went to school, "swats" were always available if we stepped too far out of line. And I saw them administered by 1 teacher or principal always with an adult witness. And I received them once myself. And we all survived and nobody was injured beyond their pride.

And if we got paddled at school, there was every bit the possibility that we would get in trouble again once we got home. There was next to zero chance that our parents would go roaring up to the school and raise hell with the teacher or principal that we had gotten punished (or threaten to sue).

If ya ask me, the removal of corporate punishment from schools can be credited as a giant step leading to the chaos that has become public school environments today.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

My grandmother had a knife (not a pocket knife either) drawn on her when she was teaching in the early 1930's by a third grader, who threatened to kill another classmate with a knife he had on him. The child was given detention and told his father or mother could come in to get the knife. They never did.

Later, in the 1950s, she taught a student who threatened to kill her and her family in front of the entire class, that student also received detention, no action on part of the parents. In the 1960's, a student threatened her over a bad grade that his father would sexually assault her (that father came in and apologized to my grandmother.)

Today, under zero tolerance policies those kids would have been expelled from school, no questions, particularly a student who injured a teacher and a fellow student with a weapon. None of these students were. Now, did they use corporal punishment on these students? Probably. But if they did, it certainly didn't stop a string of hugely inappropriate student behavior.

Until my grandmother died in 1978 she would laugh at people who made a big deal out of how out of control schools were; these are only a few of the stories she had.

 

[jamespowers]

My wife’s former teacher, who she has kept contact with through all these years, had some horrible tales to tell as well. This was teaching in ghetto schools though. She had a meat cleaver thrown at her one time! It stuck in the classroom piano! There were plenty more along those lines too. Guns, knives, explosives---you name it. :doh: This was in the 80s through 2000. It only got worse as time went along….

 

[LizzieMaine]

Today, under zero tolerance policies those kids would have been expelled from school, no questions, particularly a student who injured a teacher and a fellow student with a weapon. None of these students were. Now, did they use corporal punishment on these students? Probably. But if they did, it certainly didn't stop a string of hugely inappropriate student behavior.

This all brings to mind an incident I remember from about the sixth grade -- there was a knot of boys who took to carrying knives, which in itself was not uncommon at the time, a lot of kids had a pocket knife of some kind. But these boys called themselves the "Scar Gang," and began using the knives, not just to threaten kids at recess and committ the occasional armed robbery on the playground, but also to gouge a big gash onto the backs of their left hands as a symbol of their little club. Several of these gashes became rather gruesomely infected, and while nobody actually got gangrene as a result, it brought the whole knife situation to the attention of the school administration. Nobody was expelled or suspended, but a notice was sent home to all parents and, officially, that was the end of knife-carrying in M. S. A. D. #56.

(It should be noted that none of these boys had hippie parents, or even hippie older siblings. There were no known hippies in our town until several years after this incident occured.)

 

[sheeplady]

My wife’s former teacher, who she has kept contact with through all these years, had some horrible tales to tell as well. This was teaching in ghetto schools though. She had a meat cleaver thrown at her one time! It stuck in the classroom piano! There were plenty more along those lines too. Guns, knives, explosives---you name it. :doh: This was in the 80s through 2000. It only got worse as time went along….

My grandmother taught in a rural school district starting in a one room schoolhouse in 1924, then a 4 room school house (three grades together), and in a rural centralized school (kind of a rapid succession).

These weren't punk kids or gang kids. This is the kind of stuff that was par for the course in almost any school during the 1930s until she died according to my grandmother. We just didn't hear about it back then because it didn't become a major "thing" when a teacher was threatened or a student hurt by another student. The parents were told, and in most cases, didn't do anything to their kids or meet with the school administrator or the teacher.

If anything, the punishments then were way too lax for some of these instances- I would want a student who pulled a weapon on me out of my class, away from the classmate they threatened to kill, and in some serious therapy. If it was a pattern of behavior, or the school didn't have enough resources for the student, I would want them placed in a school that specialized in helping kids with serious issues (rather than just transferred to another district). Back then, though, the teacher was expected to patch things up, mostly on her own.

On the flip side, some of our punishments now are out of control (zero tolerance and expulsion for bringing scissors for school, for instance) while others fail miserably (allowing a group of students to threaten, bully, and harass a fellow student to suicide).

A lot of parents today think they can protect their kids from everything and expect the school to do it too. And a lot of parents don't care what their kids do, and heaven forbid the school step in to try to parent the kids for the part of the day they have them.

 

[Dennis Young]

This all brings to mind an incident I remember from about the sixth grade -- there was a knot of boys who took to carrying knives, which in itself was not uncommon at the time, a lot of kids had a pocket knife of some kind. But these boys called themselves the "Scar Gang," and began using the knives, not just to threaten kids at recess and committ the occasional armed robbery on the playground, but also to gouge a big gash onto the backs of their left hands as a symbol of their little club. Several of these gashes became rather gruesomely infected, and while nobody actually got gangrene as a result, it brought the whole knife situation to the attention of the school administration. Nobody was expelled or suspended, but a notice was sent home to all parents and, officially, that was the end of knife-carrying in M. S. A. D. #56.

(It should be noted that none of these boys had hippie parents, or even hippie older siblings. There were no known hippies in our town until several years after this incident occured.)

I'll bet they had access to tv though.

 

[Dennis Young]

Yeah, there’s some truth in that. I’m reminded of a recent case where a little boy (around 6 to 8 I think) was suspended for using his fingers to make it like a pistol.



That’s just ignorant imo. The teacher and the Principal should both be hauled up before the board of education in that case.



My mom was a teacher for 35 years and also an assistant principal. I had two aunts also who retired from teaching. We went to a little rural school and, other than the occasional fist fight on the play ground, there really was no trouble to speak of.


OTOH, the news is filled with incidents where kids run wild today. Complete disrespect for authority. Violence. And the teachers often complain they cant do a thing about it because they’ll get sued or fired.


Now…kids are kids. The kids of my day are just as human as any other era. So why are kids acting the way they do, with the frequency and over-the-top violence they are today, as opposed to my era? Were my teachers just super teachers? I really don’t think so.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'll bet they had access to tv though.

True. But so did all the other kids I knew, and very few of them ever knifed anybody. What was more common in the families and the homes of the kids who tended to be violent was violence itself. Several of their fathers or older brothers had shown up in the court news at least once for brawling, assault, or public drunkenneness.

I think media can influence people for good or ill, but I think for that to happen you already have to be predisposed one way or another. If you see your father pounding your mother or siblings around in a drunken fury a couple times a week, chances are you're going to be more influenced by that sort of thing than by what you watched on TV last night.

I grew up in the sixties and seventies and it was my generation that bridged the old authoritarian classroom style and the more casualized modern approach. My earliest teachers were the same teachers my mother had had in the 1940s. My last teachers, were, in a couple of cases, the children of those older teachers. And to be perfectly honest, in my school it didn't seem to make much of any difference before or after. The kids who were there to learn were the same group of kids all the way thru. The high school troublemakers were the same kids who had been troublemakers in the days of mean old Mrs. Knox in the first grade with her metal edged ruler and her notorious ear pull. The worst of these kids were, basically, encouraged to drop out of school because there didn't seem to be any point to trying to educate them. They were left to their own devices, and most of them ended up sinking into a deep morass of drugs, alcohol, and domestic violence. I still see their names crop up in the court news -- or the death notices -- and I'm never surprised when I do.

 

[Dennis Young]

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating beating a kid to within an inch of his life though. I mean, we’re not talking about a Charles Dickens novel. You can paddle someone, without beating them to death.


A person’s home life most certainly shapes him or her. That’s why I think its vital for people to do everything possible to ensure that their children have a safe, peaceful and happy childhood.


I think we make a mistake in thinking, however, that if a kid gets into trouble after a paddling, that the paddling served no purpose. We should not get caught in the trap that “well, the kid got suspended and then did it again, so it must not work”.
Corporal punishment did serve a purpose. I got a paddling in the 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] grade. I didn’t get another until the 9[SUP]th[/SUP] grand and none after that. I didn’t like getting a paddling. And while it hurt at the time, I was more embarrassed than anything and within 10 minutes I was fine. It didn’t kill me, didn’t scar me for life and I don’t have feelings of anger toward the principal today.


As for media, I still maintain it does influence society. If not, why bother with commercial advertising? I sure you’ll agree that tv today is vastly different than 40 years ago. Today, even in primetime, many of the most popular tv shows deal with sexual situations, as well as characters who speak insultingly toward one another (men and women). This has an impact. Its even in cartoons to some degree.

And the tv executives today, many of them, were the hippies of the 60s.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Well said,DY.
HD

 

[jamespowers]

Well said,DY.
HD

Agreed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

You'll get no argument from me about advertising, but I'll submit that the real root of the problem there goes back to the consumer culture of the late forties and thru the fifties, not just the sixties. The Boys From Marketing sold people on the idea that their purpose -- their sole purpose -- was to consume to consume and to consume, the better to satisfy the rapacious appetite of The System. They sold Americans on a delusion that "The Good Life" consisted of having more stuff than the next guy, and that sort of exaggerated hedonism basically made hippiedom inevitable. Hippies didn't really rebel against anything -- they simply rejected the hedonism of a split-level ranch house with a knotty-pine rumpus room and a new Mercury every year for their own, different kind of hedonism revolving around drugs and sex. There was no *real* revolution or rebellion in hippiedom -- in their own way they were just as conformist in their consumption-driven culture as their parents were in theirs. And the Boys didn't care either way -- a sucker is a sucker is a sucker.

I don't have any use for hippie culture. I think rock music is a travesty, I think drugs and the modern drug culture are by far the worst thing to come out of the twentieth century, and I think sex is the most overrated subject in the universe. But I also think that simply "blaming the hippies" for everything that's not the way it was when you were a kid yourself gives short shrift to the factors which actually created the hippies themselves. Either the parenting skills of the WW2 generation left a lot to be desired, or American schools in the 1950s and 1960s weren't doing their job -- because those were the spouts out of which the hippie generation flowed.

I don't watch much contemporary television, because I have better ways of spending my time. Reality programs are a pointless waste of time, but so were the formula sitcoms and trite filmed dramas of sixties television. There were a few gems among the dross, just as there are today, but in general, television has *always* been a waste of time. (But that doesn't stop the Lounge from having a very active "What Was The Last TV Show You Watched? thread.)

 

[Dennis Young]

Well, we'll just have to have a friendly disagreement. I blame the hippie culture for nearly all the ills of society today (excluding terrorism from other parts of the world that is).

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, Bro. Powers might loan you his hippy-killing laser if you ask him nice. My biggest problem with the hippies is that they weren't *real* revolutionaries -- they were nothing but spoiled middle-class children play-acting at being radicals. The real radicals of the thirties would have chewed them up and spit them out.

 

[ChiTownScion]

My biggest problem with the hippies is that they weren't *real* revolutionaries -- they were nothing but spoiled middle-class children play-acting at being radicals. The real radicals of the thirties would have chewed them up and spit them out.

The radicals of the 1930's had to be tough S.O.B.'s just to survive. Living wages and improved worker conditions were certainly never granted because of any benign generosity on the part of corporate America.

 

[jamespowers]

I don't have any use for hippie culture. I think rock music is a travesty, I think drugs and the modern drug culture are by far the worst thing to come out of the twentieth century, and I think sex is the most overrated subject in the universe. But I also think that simply "blaming the hippies" for everything that's not the way it was when you were a kid yourself gives short shrift to the factors which actually created the hippies themselves. Either the parenting skills of the WW2 generation left a lot to be desired, or American schools in the 1950s and 1960s weren't doing their job -- because those were the spouts out of which the hippie generation flowed.

I don't watch much contemporary television, because I have better ways of spending my time. Reality programs are a pointless waste of time, but so were the formula sitcoms and trite filmed dramas of sixties television. There were a few gems among the dross, just as there are today, but in general, television has *always* been a waste of time. (But that doesn't stop the Lounge from having a very active "What Was The Last TV Show You Watched? thread.)

You are quite right. I don’t just blame the stinky, lousy, good for nothing, dope smoking, smelly, lazy hippies. I blame their parents for raising their children far different than their parents and buying into the Dr. Spock BS. Behind every hippie was an over indulgent set of parents.

I still like TV because there were several programs back in the 50s and early 60s that still taught American values and the good guy always wins. Now we have the biggest dumbass always wins. :doh:


You are quite righ I just don'

 

[jamespowers]

Well, we'll just have to have a friendly disagreement. I blame the hippie culture for nearly all the ills of society today (excluding terrorism from other parts of the world that is).

You can certainly blame them as they were the nexus of the dope-smoking, lurid, promiscuous is normal, disheveled world we have today. They didn’t rebel against standards---they had none. We have ways of dealing with them. :laser::hippie:


I can also blame them for terrorism in the sense that the fools think that they can deal with terrorism by joining hands, singing kumbaya and smoking dope with the terrorists and change their minds. That ain’t gonna happen.