Nostalgia for past education

The beginning of summer is the beginning of graduation season. In various newscasts, there are guidelines coming from the some officials of the department taking care of education regarding the wisdom – or the lack of it – in engaging the many politicians much too eager to deliver their thoughts about the value of education. Often, one hears from these individuals the most banal of speeches, the severely trite advice, and nostalgia always for the kind of education they have received in the past.
One feels always, especially, if you are part of the graduating class, that your batch or class has not received the kind of education that the person up there on stage is rhapsodizing about. While you have only the future to be scared about, the guest speaker is basking in the past.
How good was education then? This is an interesting topic that needs more than a memory, and certainly one that must escape nostalgia or the mist of looking back. We can look at books perhaps. We can examine the standard textbooks that were used in public schools in the 50s and 60s, the two periods often lauded for having produced the more well-rounded persons and the more ideally educated citizens. Of course, even if we have not looked yet at some books or those empirical moments in education, we can already ask ourselves: if our society is this rotten, where then did those educating go.
As an anthropologist, however, I always see artifacts seducing me into reading something out of them. My summer digging has so far merely yielded two books. One has no cover anymore from which I can validate its intended audience. Its level of English is quite high, but this is a judgment that is not reliable. Now, if I assess the kind of language used as quite high, and having come from a Catholic elementary school, where we used to read about Abraham Lincoln, winter in Plymouth and Thanksgiving and the Indians, then this is a pleasant discovery. This confirms what my aunts who were all public school teachers used to complain about: what were we doing in a private school.?!!! In the 50s and 60s, public schools were the good schools.
They were cheap and they used good English.
The book is obviously for Social Studies. There is a section called “Then and Now.” It states under School: Then: There were no schools for the people. Not many children were taught to read and Now: Every child can go to school near his own home. It is a free school. Under Health, it says:
Then: There were no good doctors. There were no hospitals. People did not know much about good health. Many of them died young.