Did you go to school in the 60s and 70s?

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Did you go to school in the 60s and 70s?

I went to school in England. It was at a time when you dare not answer back to your elders, especially school teachers. It was at a time when teachers were allowed to beat you with a cane or slipper for misbehaving.

I was always placed at a lower level in my classes. I couldn’t read or write properly and always remember being scared to stand up and read to the other children, it was embarrassing, I didn’t learn to talk until after the age of five, so reading and writing was mumbo Jumbo until I taught myself after I left school (Irony)

Imagine a class with forty children and you’re placed at the back of the class. You’re born deaf in your left ear, so you can’t hear properly. Imagine you can’t stop rocking backwards and forward at your desk, or shaking your leg. If that’s not bad enough you have the attention span of a gold fish.

It was no wonder I did bad in most of my classes. The only time I did well was in Physical Education and Art.

Did anyone else fail miserably at school in the 60s and 70s due to ignorance of those around you? (Nobody being aware of your special needs)

I found school humiliating. The best thing about school for me was dinner time, when we were served Jam Roly Poly with Custard.

I went to school in the 60s and 70s in the States. My experiences are similar to yours, except the teachers weren't allowed to physically abuse anyone, but they were allowed to be openly scornful of anyone who wasn't 'Normal'. Then the bullies in the class would target the not-normal kids for physical abuse.

Reporting the bullying resulted in reactions like:

- "I didn't see anything; you must be lying."

- "You probably deserved it."

- "You're just over-reacting."

- "Nobody likes a tattler."

- "They're nice boys; you must be lying."

Then when I told my parents, my father would beat me for getting beat up at school.

I'm sorry you had such a bad experience in school. I can well imagine how difficult it must have been.

I went to primary school in the 60s, but my experience was quite good due to luck and an understanding mother. On top of that, Dutch schools were much more liberal compared to those of Britain. We had no school uniforms and physical punishment was out of the question. If someone was naughty, the worst that could happen was being sent to the head master and writing lines after school (I must not talk in class, 100 times). That was in a regular public school.

I had the good fortune that there was a Montessori school nearby. In these schools students learn at their own pace and can work alone if they want. The Montessori method is very different from standard teaching methods, and much more suited for children with a development disorder and/or learning disability. Children don't have to sit still all the time and don't need to ask permission to do something. Classes are small with a wider range in age and the class rooms are visually pleasing and restful.

My hell was in secondary school. I dropped out/ran away from home when I was 13.

My mom sent me to private christian schools in the 70s, I have no idea how many times I was sent to the principles office for one thing or another, back then I weighed all of about 50 or 60 pounds soaking wet and this 6' 5" 250 lb preacher would make me grab my ankles and then took this 3 foot long oak paddle, with holes in it, and hit me 10 times. No wonder I have a panic attack every time I have to talk to anyone in authority, that was grade school, I was institutionalized for two years of middle school and then I was dumped into highschool. After 3 years of not fitting in and not being noticed by any of the faculty I dropped out and took the GED and took adult highschool classes and earned an adult highschool diploma. 23 years later I go to college for the first time, earning straight A's is a no brainer for me now, but two weeks ago I was threatened with expulsion due to a miscommunication with one of my professors, they did not care that I just discovered that I have Asperger's, no one even cares about what my actual intentions were, so now I am back to looking for a job because I do not want to go to a school where everyone thinks that I am a pervert.

I was in school in the UK during the 70's, I had a crippling stammer where I could not talk in sociual situations, there answer to this was to make me stand in class and stammer my way through page after page of humiliating laughter...
I was also put into the remedial class, I assume due to my stammer and general staring out of the window all day.
I am not and was not slow but clearly misunderstood by all of the teachers except one called Mrs Foxman. She pulled me out of the remedial class and had me sit at her table at the front of the class, now she was a good teacher as she clearly saw me for what I was

Stu

I didn’t won’t to mention my other burdens, but it sounds like we had similar heartaches growing up "Knord".
My stepfather was abusive towards me, my mother was dying of Cancer. It was strange when I look back at my childhood, even though life was not so kind, I was still a very happy child.

Holland and Sweden, both these countries have a better tolerance when it comes to educating children over the years, especially children with special needs. (NewDawn) Holland is a great country like Sweden when it comes to bringing children into the world.

England is a bit of a work horse, it’s easy to over-look others when all that matters is economics and money. If there’s no profit in it, who cares, it’s always being the attitude of the British State.

I remember a poor beggar man in his 50s being turned down from a homeless shelter in the year 2000, it was in a city called Derby. It was winter time and the homeless shelter claimed the place was full (Of cause there would have been room on the floor) Anyway, when the hostel doors opened in the morning, they found the poor beggar man frozen to death on the hostel steps.
I always thought governments work for the people, I was wrong, the people work for the government.

Everyone with mental health issues or the needy should be taken care of, everyone. Nobody should be swept under the carpet like the poor beggar man.

I must've been lucky then, because primary school was my safe haven. I had the best grades and the teachers all adored me. It was also the only time in my life when I had friends without making any efforts. And the boys were crazy about me. Physical punishment was against the law in my country already at the end of the 19th century (thanks to a wonderful education reformer). Those were my golden years.

Primary school was easier for me but it was also significant that I became very 'sick' and couldn't attend school for about 3 months following an incident in which children laughed at me.

I never told my parents, I just pretended I was sick.

High school was a nightmare. Complete hell due to the extreme stress, fear and paranoia that assailed me each morning. Nothing really bad ever happened to me, but I was terrified about being discovered as different and I tried so very, very hard to fit in.

Ultimately, I ruined my education by truancy. I made up for it in later years, but I often wonder what could have happened had I been at a smaller/safer school where I might have thrived.

Hi:

Elementary school was a positive experience for me. I lived in a rural remote area, went to a very small school and the teachers who contracted out there were a bit ... maybe even a lot 'outside the box'. I had a lot of free reign, worked at my own pace and encouraged to follow my interests, was challenged, was respected when I got intense and needed time alone, and was celebrated for my rabid curiosity about the world and my need to share my 'special interests'. My peers were a pretty close rag-tag mix of regulars and transients. Go hippie culture Then along came high school. What a shock! I don't know where to even start with that one. The same 'things about me' that were allowed 'to be' in my safe little nest for my elementary years were not well received by my city high school counterparts - and that goes both for peers and staff. My brother had a parallel experience in most ways, except that he had the disadvantage of 'not being socialized like a girl'. He was called (and this is the term the school authorities used): ret*d. Testing revealed his academic ability to be equivalent with a third year university student when he was just in grade 8. The school wanted him to quit, but my mom pressed for him to stay. He never fully completed grade 8 and went on to body-destroying blue collar manual labor where he remains to this day. Both my brother and I were bullied mercilessly in junior high. As I did not have the same 'work choice' as my brother (gender/generation/socio-cultural climate I occupied), I more or less 'hung around' until the end of school. I skipped out a whole lot, dulled my pain with drugs, did distance ed for a year (should have kept at it - that was an improvement) and wasn't much more than a loner/floater when I hit senior high and the bullying had died down to indifference. I just didn't know what to do with myself. Apparently, neither did anyone else.

My high school math teacher, Upchurch, was notorious for being extremely unfair to students he disliked. That included completely different standards on grading homework and tests.

He didn't like my family at all. My oldest two brothers and my sister were 10 to 15 years old than me and they were in his classes in the late 1950s and in 1960 when he hadn't been there long.

I don't know how well he got along with my oldest brother, but he hated my second oldest brother, Charlie, who hated him in return. Charlie was overweight and so the teacher would make fun of him for it in front of the class.

When doing homework, Charlie would explain the math to the others in the class, but when it came time to turn it in, he would turn in a page of paper with only his name at the top because he didn't recognize the teacher has having the authority to grade anything of his.

I remember when I was young how my sister was always complaining to my parents about Upchurch.

Fast forward to when I was a freshman in high school, and Upchurch was determined to flunk me out of his class. The semester was broken into six weeks periods. I made a C the first six weeks. Toward the end of the second six weeks I got the mumps and was out of school for the last week of the second six weeks and the first week of the third six weeks. He refused to let me make up any homework or tests that I missed and gave me an F for both six weeks. And then I made a 100 on the final exam for the semester!

After that I made A's in the rest of his classes.

My senior year of high school, Upchurch was gone. He had relapsed into his old behaviors and arbitrarily flunked a couple of students, including my younger brother. His big mistake was that the other student's father was on the school board. After that, Upchurch was gone -- the school board refused to renew his contract for another year.

I later found out the reason that Upchurch had stopped trying to flunk me out of the classes -- my father went to the school and had a long talk with him and flat out told him that he wasn't going to permit him to ruin another of his kid's scholastic careers. I don't know if he used legal threats or physical threats to the teacher, but I suspect that he threatened legal action. So when I took the semester exam, it was finally graded fairly and honestly for the first time and that's why I made a 100 on the exam.

I went on and received my BS and MS in Math from Texas A&M University.

Years later, someone from the local college called me up and asked if I'd like to come teach math part time. I was looking to get out of Houston where I had been living and so I accepted and moved back up here to teach math at the college and to help out my next to the oldest brother with his business so I accepted the job and moved back up here.

A couple of months later, I found out that if I had not accepted the job, they were going to offer it to Upchurch. So I beat my old math teacher out for the job. The feeling of beating him out for the job was quite sweet.

Yes, I attended school in the 60s and 70s in Southern California. My teachers were pretty great, especially in elementary school, though in high school some of them were iffy. They were mostly liberal-minded people, curious and able to help keep our curiosity alive. But the curriculum was so Cold War oriented that we got a lot of rhetoric about the state of the world that I now feel was problematic. A lot of the warnings we got fed about the Soviets were about things our own government does today.

Overall, in school I had a lot more problems with other students than with teachers, but not really that many with students either. I was also good at my studies. It was just that I was so introverted, shy, and bad at communicating that I was constantly stressed by the social requirements of school, so I hated it.

What is 'your country', may I ask?

The school district that I was in as a first and second grader was a one room schoolhouse. I attended the local out of district school in town instead so I never went to school in the one room school house. Without me, there was only one student there in my grade -- I would have been the second.

My oldest brothers and sister all went to school there as did my father and my aunt. I assume that my grandfather and his brothers and sisters went there as well, but it's possible that they may have been home schooled.

When they closed the school, there was an election to decide which school district to merge with. The choices were a school district in Texas or a school district in Oklahoma. The school district in Texas won. The parents of the other kid who was my age wanted Oklahoma and so from then on they sent their kids to school out of district into Oklahoma instead of the school district in Texas.

naturalplastic, my country of origin is Uruguay, and it used to be an amazingly advanced country from the point of view of social laws.

The name of the reformer was Jose Pedro Varela. He banned physical punishment in the 1880's as well as religious and political indoctrination or even symbols in public schools. We owe him an excellent educational system and he's a country hero.

Maybe I was lucky at school, maybe those were better times, maybe because it wasn't the Anglo-saxon world, I don't know, but I never heard of such a thing as bullying or crime among pupils as I read on WP. Maybe there was such a thing and I don't know, but the public school was more like a place to seek solace from abuse and/or hunger in the home. By law, schools had to serve milk and bread to any kid that wanted it and school supplies for those whose parents didn't have the means to buy pencils, notebooks, etc.

I started school in 1970 in Alabama. There were about 20 kids in each class, it was a fairly small private school. My grades were great but my problems were with socializing and because I was wierd, I was picked on. I was one of those kids that everybody knew of and nobody really liked and it was always open season. Nobody knew of AS back then.

Yes, they could paddle us then and I got paddled a few times. They still can paddle kids at school in Alabama with the parents permission. Most parents give permission and most kids choose it over detention when they are given a choice.

My youngest son is deaf in his left ear also. He was born that way. He talked a little late. He has ADHD for sure and I'm suspecting now that he has AS as well, like I do. The only AS symptom he doesn't have is the social problems. He's very social and outgoing and charming. He can sell air conditioners to Eskimos. They have suggested the implant in that ear so he can hear but he doesn't want to. He said everything would be too loud and he's used to it the way things are. The only problem he has is if somebody is on his wrong side and talking low.

Uruguay sounds like they care about what’s important with children, their needs and welfare.

Margaret Thatcher stopped free milk for children in the early 80s I believe. Mean old bag. Her children were ok, daddy was a millionaire.