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By Lloyd Albritton

Columnist

When I was in public school many years ago our textbooks were free in the state of Florida where I attended my first through twelfth grade years. Textbooks were issued to students at the beginning of each school year and turned in by each student at the end of the year. I took my free Florida textbooks for granted all those years. If my modest-income parents had been required to buy textbooks for six children, I don’t know how they would have done it. Even so, I took good care of my textbooks because I was raised to take care of stuff, especially books. Books were sacred at our house. That was not the case with many students, who often turned in their books tattered and abused, if they turned them in at all. Our school never seemed to enforce the rule that required students to pay for textbook depreciation, destruction, or loss.
I grew to love my textbooks. I was in awe of the vast amount of knowledge contained in them. How smart I would be, I thought, if I knew all that was written in those wonderful books. I loved the quality bindings, the hardy page stitching and the slick, durable pages. I loved the feel of textbooks. I even loved the smell of them.
Encyclopedias were my favorite educational books. There was so much information in encyclopedias that I hardly knew where to begin. When I tried to look up a particular subject, I usually got lost somewhere between A and Z. When my mother purchased a set of World Book encyclopedias from a door-to-door salesman in the 1950s, I felt like I was in Hog Heaven. I read them day and night. I could not put the beautiful volumes down. I loved to stare at them on the shelf, touch them reverently and let my fingers fondle the luxurious bindings.
I loved books of all kinds. At my elementary school in Davisville, Fla., a small white wood frame school with about a hundred students in grades 1-6, our school library was located in a small closet in the sixth grade classroom, which was taught by the school Principal W. M. Horton, a native of Mississippi. The school did not have an actual library budget, so all the books were donated and were an eclectic collection of topics, mostly adventure and hero novels. I read virtually all of them. I especially loved the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn novels by Mark Twain. I loved to read about frontier heroes like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and Natty “Hawkeye” Bumppo. I loved all the animal books too, such as White Fang, the fearless Alaskan Sled Dog, Freckles, the Chicken, and especially Smokey, the Cow Horse, which I read five times.
In those days comic books were popular and I consumed comic books (we called them funny books) by the dozen. They only cost a dime and some of my friends had hundreds of them at home. I loved when I visited those friends to stay overnight and could read their comic books. Some of my favorite comic book characters were Red Ryder, Kid Cody, Superman, Batman and Spiderman. Comic books were easy to fold and stick in my back pocket for easy access while riding the school bus or waiting in a line.
I loved to read the newspaper comics too. Dagwood was one of my favorites. Beetle Baily was hilarious. Alley Oop, Lil Abner, Hi and Lois and Peanuts were all popular comics that I enjoyed during that time. I could list them on and on as I think about them. I used to spread the Sunday paper out on the living room floor, lie on my stomach, and read them all. The comics were published daily, but on Sunday they were all in color and I savored them.
We did our schoolwork in those days with a No. 2 lead pencil on lined notebook paper. We learned to print in the First Grade, but were doing our work in cursive handwriting by the Third Grade. I fell in love with the process of writing even at that young age. It helped me to clarify, organize and articulate my thoughts. I developed the habit of talking to myself even then, a habit, which I have continued until the present. My friends often observe me driving down the highway talking and waving my hands and they ask, “Who were you talking to?”
“Myself,” I respond. “I was talking to myself.” It is a practice which helps me to articulate my thinking, but I do not recommend it so much to others, for many people are likely to think you are crazy.
In my school days teachers regularly stood in front of their classes and lectured. Some were boring, but many were interesting and engaging. Teaching in those days was not so much about conveying information to students as it was inspiring and motivating students to search out their own answers and solutions through reading, research and doing their homework. Exemplar teachers took pride in engaging their students in the classroom by employing real-life examples and illustrations of how the information could be important and useful to them. One of my teachers in high school, Ms. Patti Stone, inspired my interest in history by sharing colorful personal stories about individual historical characters that were not found in the textbook. It was as if she knew them personally. She always left me wanting to know more. Real learning took place by each student’s individual efforts. Mr. Horton, my Sixth Grade teacher, often entertained his science classes by letting a lizard bite his earlobe and hang from his ear. He had a fountain pen that he could throw like a dart and stick into the wall. Mr. Horton knew lots of mystery math tricks which he worked out on the chalkboard with class participation. He made learning fun and entertaining.
School classrooms today largely focus on completing assignments on electronic devises like Chromebooks, both in the classroom and for homework. Lessons are composed and posted onto computer learning applications by the central school system and students complete the assignments on their own. There is very little student-teacher interaction in the classroom anymore except when teachers shout at students to sit down and be quiet. Students use notebook paper mostly to make paper airplanes and pencils to break apart and throw at one another. Contemporary students do not learn cursive handwriting anymore. With every student owning an electronic device these days, there seems to be no need for it. Many students do not read anymore because there is little these days that cannot be accessed visually and audio-wise on YouTube or other media. Many students enter college these days without note-taking skills and other traditional study skills. Recent research studies reveal that U.S. students in K-12 schools are function well below grade level in virtually every academic discipline.
Indeed, education has changed a lot since I was in school over sixty years ago. During that time a revolution in information technology has taken place. One would think that learning systems would have improved to keep up with the increasing demands for faster and more effective learning. After all, there is a lot more to learn these days than ever before. Are we keeping up? I don’t think so.