Jamie Vollmer is the author of the famous Blueberry Story. He was working for an ice cream company that won recognition for making the best ice cream in America. Buoyed by success, he would go to conferences and decry the sorry state of American education, based on what he knew of business.
One day, when speaking to a group of teachers, someone asked him what his company would do if he got a shipment of damaged blueberries. He promptly replied that the shipment would be thrown away. The teacher responded, we don’t throw away any of our blueberries, we take them all.
Vollmer had a transformational experience, an epiphany. And he became a champion of public education.
Here he discusses what he calls “notesia.” Nostegia is a combination of nostalgia and amnesia. Please send this link to every reformer you know. Send it to editorial writers and business leaders. Send it to Arne Duncan. Send it to Condi Rice. Let it go viral.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One of the best comments on the “good old days” argument was uttered by a wonderful comic, Jackie “Moms” Mobley (1894-1975).
I saw this many years ago when she appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Her humor had a bite and wisdom that could linger long after the joke. It convinced me, forever, of the hollowness of those who use it to justify the unjustifiable.
Context: Carson asked her if she, with so many years behind her, had any wisdom to impart to those younger. She replied:
“They’re always talkin’ about the good old days, the good old days. Well, I was there. Where was they?”
🙂
She would have had a field day with the edubullies.
I wrote this posting about a year ago.
“The schools ain’t what they used to be and probably never were.” — Will Rogers.
Given the amount of news on the subject, by now everyone knows today’s education system is in crisis. It can’t seem to produce any of the well educated students it use to be able to produce. At least so we’re told over and over again. So, it stands to reason that, sometime in the past, there was a “Golden Age” of American education. But when was it.
I started teaching in 1970. It wasn’t long thereafter that I began hearing about the need for “accountability in education” . I’ve been listening to that litany ever since. So, we can infer that the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s or 00’s are out.
That means it must have been the 60’s, right? The 60’s, you say? You’re kidding, right; the era of hippies and drugs? OK, maybe not. In 1961, the Council for Basic Education claimed that 1/3 of 9th graders could read at only a 2nd or 3rd grade level. In 1967, Jeanne Chall’s book, “Learning to Read: The Great Debate”, attacked the abandonment of phonics. OK, so it’s not the 60’s.
That means it must have been the 50’s. I remember the 50’s. Second through tenth grade. Wonderful decade. Good education? Not if you use me as the example, but that’s not the fault of the system. But, I digress. In 1958, Hannah Arendt warned that standards lagged and Life magazine compared a Russian student and an American student to point out the shabby American results. OK, so it’s not the 50’s.
One would think a world war would disrupt the 40’s rather seriously, but let’s look anyway. Atlantic Monthly reported a suburban Massachusetts public school board member’s comment that, if you kid can’t read or do math, maybe you’d better mortgage your home and send him/her to private school. In 1947, Benjamin Fine’s book, “Our Children Are Cheated”, said education faces a serious crisis. Apparently, the issue of “social promotions” was also being identified as a source of the problem. OK, so it’s not the 40’s. Beginning to see a pattern here?
•In1909, Ellwood Cubberly, Stanford education dean, said in his book, Changing Conceptions of Education, that America was coming up short in the battle of international economies.
•In 1902, the New York Sun reported that students did little work.
•In 1896, Harvard’s Board of Overseers complained about the poor quality of undergraduates.
•In 1837, 300 Massachusetts teachers were forced out of their rooms by riotous and violent students.
The message here is Will Roger’s analogy. This constant reference to the great schools of the past is fictional nostalgia. Don’t believe me, read Chapter 1 of Richard Rothstein’s book, “The Way We Were: The Myths and Realities of America’s Student Achievement.”
Thanks for the wonderful bit on the “good ol days”. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi5Oozc7o2M&playnext=1&list=PL905927ED1E8E1AAF&feature=results_video for a great song by John Hartford (songwriter of “Gentle on My Mind” ) “Back in the Goodle Days”
For Hartford’s version of “Gentle on My Mind” (made popular by Glen Campbell) see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbZHIoaapmE&feature=list_other&playnext=1&list=AL94UKMTqg-9BYt7BG6-FjlWEPTdFvTE-1
Sorry for the little remembering of one of my favorite singer/songwriters, but Hartford was truly one of a kind. Grew up in Alton, IL across the mighty Mississippi a little northeast of St. Louis. He eventually owned his own tow boat and thoroughly loved singing about the river and its history. He definitely was a “throw back” even though he made his money out west writing many a hit for others to sing in the late 60s and early 70s. Took a buddy of mine to see Johny Hartford and Vassar Clements at Jesse Hall at Mizzou in 1974 for his 21st birthday. We snuck in a quart Ball jar of vodka to drink-ha ha!!!
Lyrics: Back in the Goodle Days
One day about twenty-five years from now,
When we’ve all grown old from a-wondering how,
Oh we’ll all sit down at the city dump,
And talk about the Goodle Days.
Oh you’ll pass the joint and I’ll pass the wine,
And anything good from a-down the line.
A lot of good things went down one time,
Back in the Goodle Days.
Chorus:
And the Good Old Days are past and gone.
A lot of good people have done gone on.
That’s my life when I sing this song about
Back in the Goodle Days
Verse 2:
Sometimes I get to thinkin’ that we’re almost done,
And there ain’t nothin’ left that we can figure out.
And I guess it must have seemed a lot more like that
Back in the Goodle Days,
But when ya gotta go, ya gotta go.
There’s always somebody don’tcha know,
A-hangin’ round a-sayin’ “Well I told you so”,
Back in the Goodle Days.
Chorus
Verse 3:
Oh we’ll all join hands and we’ll gather round,
When that old guitar starts to make that sound.
A lot of good things went down downtown,
Back in the Goodle Days.
Squeezin’ love with the people that we hadn’t even met,
Out for anything that we could get.
Oh we did it then and we’ll do it yet,
Back in the Goodle Days.
Chorus
I have several LPs of John Hartford. I saw him at a little place a few miles from where I live in a building that caters to bluegrass music and entertainment. It was a small audience. Even had a chance to talk to him. He was as laid back as his music.
I hadn’t known about Vollmer until now, so thank you! One of the best things on his website is the series of historical facts in the section “Just when was the Golden Age of American Education?” on the left side of this page:
http://www.jamievollmer.com/nostesia.html
Eli Broad has an extremely severe case of notesia. When he talks about education, he frequently starts with “I remember when…” I would love to eavesdrop in on a conversation between Vollmer and Broad.
Carol Burris has tried to help Broad with his notesia problem, but he’s a person who pats himself on the back for practicing “the art of being unreasonable” so it’s unlikely that any insights or wisdom from others, or even straight-forward historical facts, will help him out.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/challenging-eli-broads-school-memories/2012/06/10/gJQArn7ZTV_blog.html
I challenge anyone who talks about “the good old days” to look me in the eye and tell me exactly when public education was better for little black girls or young latino boys.
Or girls in general, or gay kids, or kids with disabilities or poor kids…
In short, right on, my friend, right on.
One of the strangest moments in “Waiting for Superman,” for me, was Geoffrey Canada saying that American public schools were doing a “pretty good job” until the mid-1960s. I was aghast. Did he really mean to say that schools were better during segregation? For whom?
This false nostalgia for a past that never was, isn’t just sad – it’s corrosive. It denies the effort, the struggle, the sacrifices, and the progress we’ve made to ensure that every American is “included in ‘We, the people.'”
Yes, of course that’s what he’s saying. Because for a lot of white people (even those who would never consider themselves racist) schools *were* better before “those people” were admitted to “good” schools.
BTW, I’m white, married to a black man. I just see it all the time – more or less well-meaning white people are still scared of blacks in general. They may be fine with individual blacks whom they get to know, but “black” as a racial construct is still very scary to them.
The opening lines of the Satyricon of Petronius are a conversation between a professor and his TA about the declining standards of education and teachers being forced by market conditions to pander to their students. This was written around 60 AD in Rome.
Been going on for a long time now. It was always better way back when.
And even young ‘uns have a longing for the old days sometimes.
Not to get all sentimental here, but I was just reminded of when I saw the film adaptation of Daisy Miller at age 10. It has just come out. We went as a family to see it. I had no idea what to expect. I remember how it ended with the song “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” and I came out of the theater bawling. My parents asked me what was the matter, and not knowing what to say, I replied, “I didn’t understand it!” But in fact the opposite was true. I had understood something and didn’t know how to reconcile that with myself. I somehow understood, for a second, as a ten-year-old, what it meant to regret lost youth.
The point is that we need nostalgia. Some need it more than others, of course, but we need it. It has its deceptions, but it can also guide us to insights. We have it because memory allows us to shape the past in our minds. When the past was present, it was all rough and rude and unshaped, and thus was more mixed than the thing we made of it years later. But that shaping in the memory, even fond shaping, is an essential part of what we do. It becomes harmful only when we cling to the loveliness of the shape and push away the realities.
And one of my JH favorites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aXZmbbPLaM&feature=autoplay&list=AL94UKMTqg-9BYt7BG6-FjlWEPTdFvTE-1&playnext=6 “Up on the Hill Where They Do the Boogie”
Listen for the line of the “PTA”
It depends. Certain kinds of nostalgia are not false. It’s just important to remember that those rosy eras were not all rosy.
For instance, we do seem a bit more obsessed with test scores than we were a few decades ago. At that time, people generally took the tests in stride (relatively speaking). Yes, they worried about how they did, and yes, certain tests had stakes attached. But teachers and parents reminded students that there was more to education and to life than the SATs and such. (Sometimes people could be TOO laid back–but in the best scenarios, tests were taken in their proper measure.)
On the other hand, people believed in sheer ability and IQ–more than they do now, or at least more than they admit to believing now. If you didn’t do well in math (or whatever it might be), they generally assumed it wasn’t your forte and left you alone. They figured you’d find something else you could do well. (That’s both good and bad.)
Of course there are exceptions and countercurrents in any era. It’s difficult to say that an era was this or that. But it is possible (and not shameful) to look back nostalgically on a certain aspect of it. The challenge is to keep the other aspects in mind as well.
Our expectations of kids are much much higher today. My elementary school taught barely any science. My daughter took a science STAR test in 5th grade that covered science I was not taught in any grade.
What was the elite track for math in the 1980’s is the standard track for kids in California today.
And, now we expect all the kids to take the tests. More kids take the SAT every year. Minority kids often never even had a chance to take it in Ye Olden Days.
Off topic…
I believe you listed the treasure chests of many of the “reform” groups and foundations. Could you please repost something like that or direct us to a place where we can find that information?
I am so over people acting like the politicians on the opposing side are helpless because of all of the money flowing in from the unions. The other side has the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, Foundation for Florida’s Future, Foundation for Excellence in Education, Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform, StudentsFirst, and all of the hedge fund managers with their own groups or who are giving these groups money.