Quote:
Originally Posted by allenk893
Saw this fascinating video and immediately thought of some of you. Nothing like what people stereotypically think when discussing the 50s. I was floored by the diverse group of students, thoughts expressed, and overall attitudes reflected by all in the video.
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Do some of you see your teenaged self in these students?
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I graduated from high school in 1956.
The video certainly reflected the thoughts and decisions of a number of my cousins and my classmates. I came from a prosperous small town (5,000) with light industries, but it was set in farming countryside. There were two cities (Rochester and Buffalo, NY) with populations of more than 100,000 not far away - 25 miles and 45 miles. The school "system" was one grade school and one high school, but the latter was academically superior to the schools in villages of a similar size, and was visited and studied by people from other schools. My family was for most of my youth in the lower end of the working class. Both at the time, and looking back. I think we had it all....though, fortunately, our lives were not cutsey
Leave It to Beaver or
Father Knows Best slick. It was a wonderful place to grow up in, but it certainly also had rough edges and sharp points.
My three maternal cousins were brought up on a farm in the hill country to the south of my village, and went to school in a town there. The two boys wanted to be farmers and started their post-high school lives that way, their sister married the son of a farmer, and he worked in a rural feed store. One of the guys couldn't make it as a farmer, but discovered that he had some amazing talents and spent his life working in the U.S. space program. (He was an absolute sponge for any technical education he received in adult life!)
I had scads of paternal cousins in one of the nearby metro areas, and they all went college.
Our school set college as the goal, and many parents wanted that for their kids as well. My graduation class was about eighty-five. A very large percentage started out at some type of higher education after high school - I can remember the local newspaper remarked on what an usually high number it was. But some quit after a year or two and came back to work in the village.
Because our village had several small factories as well as businesses, the classmates who did not go to college or tried it and left were able to find work in these, or in one of the nearby cities. A good number of my high school classmates were from farm families, and a few did not try college but became farmers.
The publicity I received for our 50th class reunion said that almost half of the members of my graduation class still lived withing fifty miles of our hometown. But as I recall, most of us who began college did finish.
I probably would have had to go to a low tuition state college or school based on my family's income. However, I won a competitive scholarship which paid my tuition and a supplementary one that paid my room and board, and I went to a private university. My ideas about education and my future were largely a combination of those of two of the participants in the film.
One one hand, I thought that you were supposed to get an education that prepared you for a specific occupation and that occupation would be one that would raise your socio-economic status above that of your parents. (More than twenty-five percent of my class had parents or grandparents who were immigrants, and the idea of social class advancement as a goal in life was very acceptable.) On the other hand, our high school was very sophisticated academically, so the idea of getting a broad education which would give you a better understanding of our culture and the world was also firmly implanted in my mind. (One of the girls in the film is an advocate of this point of view.)
[An aside: I took a vocationally oriented major in the university, but the program required that you take a second major - preferably in Liberal Arts - in addition. So, I got to pursue each of the high school ideals of what you went to college for.]
The last I knew I was one of the - if not,
the - most statistically atypical of our class. But only because I live the farthest away from our hometown, and in a foreign country.
The most atypical in a much more meaningful way is the class "loser." He was the son of one of my father's best friends. He had zero interest in school subjects -
any school subject. He was always academically in the bottom part of our class. He was a friendly guy and did not give any indication of having any learning disabilities, he just seemed massively bored by school. He was the only person in my class who failed to qualify for either the state secondary school diploma or the local school district diploma. He received a "certificate of attendance." What I learned informally from the person who sent me the 50th class reunion material was that he had become very successful in business and was probably the wealthiest of our classmates.
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I found this very interesting
