The phrase "back to school" always carried with it a tinge of sadness, along with a little magic for me during my school years. I thought that we would examine the mixed emotions involved in the "return to school" and perhaps remember how the carefree joys of summer holidays were so rudely interrupted by a spree of shopping for school supplies and new clothes.
Whether you’re heading back to school yourself or have children or grandchildren starting the new school year, there’s something about the beginning of September that is bound to stir up some childhood memories.
The beginning of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) was a sure sign that I had better buckle down and start relishing my freedom as school and all that school implied were just around the corner.
My memories, as I look back on September’s past, involved an assortment of familiar and not-so-familiar objects that would become my daily school companions: notebooks, rulers, pens, and a backpack. I still have some of my school items from "back in the day," and they still can magically conjure up a favourite teacher, an early crush, neat rows of desks, my class clown antics, and the beloved recess bell.
If you visit our local museum, you will find a century or more of school supplies on display, a testament to years of history written on the classroom chalkboard.
The cost to send a child back to school in the fall is crazy today. We, as a family, were not very well off, and so the return to school meant that I could finally get new shoes and a couple of pairs of pants and a new shirt. I would pray, "please let the styles still be the same; I don’t want to be the one out of date on the first day."
I was encouraged in June to bring home my pens, pencils and rulers and any notebooks I might have left to minimize the cost of new ones in the fall. A trip to Mr. Campbell’s to pick up my textbooks was a local tradition as I think he had the monopoly locally.
For those like me whose family did not have a lot, the expense of returning to school could be a worry for my parents. As I have said before in these articles, I didn’t know back then that we were poor, more the wonder that my parents always found the money to send me back in style. I would imagine that financial issues must still stress families at this time of year.
While there are many points of commonality between then and now, there are still some stark differences in the ways in which students were educated in years past versus more recent generations. We did not have a worldwide medical emergency to cope with back then although polio was still a factor. Bad weather was a joy of my life, no school. We were never forced to study from home.
It does not really matter whether you loved or hated your time at school; each of us has, tucked away in a cupboard or drawer somewhere, an assortment of school objects we have collected over the years, fond memories of our school days gone by. These relics of my own personal history can often spark vivid tales from my youth, and if they survive the passage of time, another generation may one day retell my stories from an old notebook, textbooks or perhaps my purple and gold letter from high school. But some enthusiasts go far beyond their own personal reminiscences, they collect items that still enrich our collective memory.
The York Region District School Board used to exhibit just such a profound reverence for the past in Richmond Hill, where they built an impressive collection of school items going back to the beginning of the 19th century: workbooks, provincial examinations, inkwells, world maps, globes, lunchboxes and more. I certainly hope that they still maintain this collection. It was also the home of Evelyn Denne’s wood pointer, a huge part of my school experience.
In the early 1900s, only about half of children ages five to 19 were enrolled in school. At that time, they were most needed to work on family farms or in the growing numbers of factories founded around town.
By the 1970s, however, school attendance had increased to over 75 per cent. Today those numbers are well over 95 per cent in developed countries. Sadly, in the developing world, however, it is estimated that over 264 million school-age children still do not receive any formal education.
In the 1800s, many rural schools had a single classroom, with one teacher conducting grades 1–8. I remember some of the people I have interviewed over the years as part of my oral history project have spoken of how when studying their ABCs, the younger students would sit in the front rows, while older students sat toward the back. Exercises were written on black slates with chalk, while assessments took place at the front of the classroom, where students would recite what they had memorized. Students brought their lunches in tin pails from home, and yes, they walked miles to and from school.
Today the average Canadian elementary school has about 600 students, with a campus that provides approximately 188 square feet per student. The average cost per student per year is around $43,693, including all the books, technology, coursework, etc.
Back in my day, it was common for children to walk or ride their bikes to school, even as far as two or three miles, no matter the weather. Most children today have heard their parents or grandparents share a few tales about the challenges posed by these intrepid walks to school.
Today, most children seem to get to school via bus or carpool. Interestingly, more schools are encouraging students to reconsider walking or biking to school so that they will get more daily exercise. The walk to school was one of my favourite parts of going to school, as I would meet my friends along the way, and some of the best moments of my life were spent on my way to or from school.
I don’t think I ever came straight home from school, taking hours to make the commute even though my schools were never more than half an hour away from my house.
I read an article about a new phenomenon known as "a walking school bus," where students are supervised by a parent who walks with a group of kids to school together. This way, protective parents ensure that students are safe but are also getting more exercise. As I remember it, I was shoved out the door and wished good luck.
Because I grew up in Newmarket and the town back then was relatively small, a return to school was a chance to reconnect with my friends, the ones who were away during summer break. I don’t remember much anxiety about who was in my class each year, as I had roughly the same crew in my classes since I had started school; it was that way until I headed off to high school. I nearly always knew my teacher, as teachers back then seemed to stay put, the same school, same grade so I grew up knowing I would have Mr. Hollingsworth in Grade 5.
Many of the elements of the school that I disliked at the time have thankfully disappeared. Standing in a corner wearing a dunce cap and enduring harsh teacher reprimands are now a thing of the past. I understand that “time-outs” and a greater focus on positive reinforcement have become the mainstay of newer educational philosophies of children’s discipline.
When I attended school, we had standardized testing, which, for someone like me, was a nightmare. Today there is a promise of a shift away from typical standardized tests at the end of the school term to a greater focus on creative and critical thinking meant to prepare children for the ever-changing job market.
While reading, writing, history, and math will always be the core of any educational curricula, there are vast differences in what children studied back when I attended versus today. Gone are the home economics classes of the '60s and '70s, which focused on preparing dinner, baking a cake, or sewing on a button. Shop class, which was strangely difficult for me back then, seems to have morphed into a more focused curriculum for those who show an aptitude in that area of study.
There is most certainly a greater focus on technology now. We took music and art, and while I didn’t show any particular aptitude or skill, it has proven vital to my continued love of art and music today.
I am told that contemporary schools rarely place emphasis on penmanship as they did when I attended, and many no longer even teach cursive writing. Articles seem to indicate that some of these courses have seen a comeback, re-instituted home economics classes, now called family and consumer sciences, which focus on nutrition, child development, food service, and hospitality. Many other types of coursework from the '60s and '70s have been abandoned today, and, in their place, there is a new focus on technology, such as researching a paper online or utilizing new online teaching modules and lessons.
Whether you’ve been bombarded by a multitude of Back-to-School advertisements or are beginning to see groups of students with brand-new backpacks and crisp, clean new school duds crossing the street, we just can’t help but be taken back to a time when the scent of freshly sharpened pencils signalled a return to the classroom.
Craving a fresh reminder of your return to school in September? For this article, I thought I would give all of you the opportunity to share your back-to-school memories with all of us. To this end, I have provided some questions which can help to structure your responses and perhaps get you to reminisce.
- What are some of your meaningful memories from your own school days? Tell me more in the comments below.
- What did you like about school, and what do you miss? What were your favourite subjects/activities?
- What did your typical morning be like? What time did you need to get out of bed, and what time did you need to leave? Were you one of those who needed to go to bed early?
- How did you get to school and back home? Did you walk or ride your bike or take a bus?
- Did you decide what to wear, or was that a family decision?
- Did you take your lunch or come home?
- Were there any public health guidelines you needed to follow? My mom insisted that I ask the teacher to move me away from other students with a cough or sniffles.
- What was the hardest thing about going back to school? What did you worry about?
I think that everyone of a particular generation has similar memories of the "great migration back to school," and it would be great to share them.
Next, I will resume our historical timeline with the opening of the year 1979
Newmarket resident Richard MacLeod, the History Hound, has been a local historian for more than 40 years. He writes a weekly feature about our town's history in partnership with Newmarket Today, conducts heritage lectures and walking tours of local interest, and leads local oral history interviews. You can reach him at [email protected]
