Janice Collins Bailey, Ways That Schooling Has Changed

Janice Collins Bailey

When we went to school, there was a more monolithic view about school and respect for teachers. If you got in trouble at school, you were going to be in more trouble when you got home. After WW II, most of our mothers worked at home, so they could more easily keep up with their children’s schoolwork and activities. Now, most families have two parents working as hard as they can to make ends meet or only have one parent in the home. These days, parents have been known to come to school and threaten teachers. That’s a change!

Not many changes have occurred at the early childhood level, but some things are different.

Curriculum. I liked being able to design our own curriculum, typically using a different topic each week. I wasn’t tied down to a prescribed curriculum or a certain number of minutes a day on reading and other topics, which occurs today in early childhood programs.  

Materials. A teacher friend and I usually planned together to order books from the central school library. She would use them one week and I would use them the other.  In the best programs today, there are more resources available to teachers.

Learning Environment. Most of the sessions on how to teach that I experienced showed teachers working really hard. Our method was to provide an environment where anything the children chose to be involved in was educational so they could choose what they wanted to do and for how long. This environment gave us time to observe what was going on in different areas of the classroom and how particular children were functioning. If you don’t keep three and four year-old’s doing something constructive, they will busy themselves at something they think up, which is frequently upsetting to somebody else.  Today, different schools of thought remain on how to organize early childhood schooling such as prescribed curriculum vs. more open, hands-on discovery.

Social and Emotional Skills. Probably the most important things children can learn in preschool are social and emotional skills, including learning why we have rules. The first task for the teacher is to get the children to trust and rely on him or her. The preschool teacher also needs to prevent a child from putting them in a corner that makes them give up authority they can’t give up. Therefore, we told children what they need to do instead of telling them what not to do. We also never give ultimatums that we cannot follow through on, because the child will test it every time.  

Diversity. My daughter and granddaughter teach in high school – at the other end of public school. The degree of diversity, such as the number of different languages and cultures, is a challenge for teachers and students.  Except at KSU, I usually worked with minorities or children otherwise needing a head start in how to deal with the routine of school. My daughter and granddaughter also have to deal with computers, and we did not. 

Academic Standards. Since there was an outcry about keeping children back if they were struggling with one level of learning, students are now accustomed to being passed along no matter if they do the grade work successfully or not. When they get to high school, many expect to graduate even if they didn’t come to school often, slept or did other things besides assignments in class. Wichita high schools now have a room for students who didn’t graduate, where they can take online the classes they flunked. This moves students along and the graduation rate looks better.

Ambiguity About Roles. My daughter told of a girl walking into her classroom the other day with roaches crawling out of her backpack onto her clothes. She quickly got the girl out of the room and down to where she could take a shower. Then, school personnel tried to deal with the situation as best they could. They called the landlord and said the girl’s living quarters would have to be fumigated. Think how impossible the school nurse’s job is nowadays. Testing kids and teachers for Covid. Calling around to get someone to pick the children up from school. And all the legwork to trace contacts for each student having Covid!

Today, there seems to be less agreement on what schools are responsible for doing and what parents and community should do. Teaching and learning why we have rules and how to follow them is not as simple as it used to be.