What are they teaching in school?

Every generation thinks the next generation is going to be the one that ends civilization as we know it.

Our parents thought we were too ‘fresh’, wore weird clothes, had strange hair-do’s, and followed up each criticism of us with, “What is this world coming to?”

I disliked my childhood but am grateful for it now. My standing joke to people about my upbringing is that my mother was trained at Auschwitz. She was tough, demanding, bossy, and stubborn.

My mother was going to raise two daughters who would have the advantage over anyone else’s daughters when it came to washing, ironing, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and setting a proper dinner table. She was raising housewives.

I believe she sent us to school because it was the law. Everything we ever needed to know about life we could learn at home.

College? Never going to happen so don’t even think about it. My parents never attended a parent-teacher conference, never saw a report card except to sign it…if we didn’t forge their signature. (Back in the day parents had to sign the report cards that were brought home from school, and then we returned them the next day). They also never attended a school function and never saw a progress report. Some genius thought it would be better to send progress reports through the mail so little Johnny or Mary couldn’t ‘lose’ them if they were sent home with the child. News flash…my sister and I got the mail every day on our way home. And yes, every one of those progress reports was ‘lost’.

Through all of this, I did receive a basic education with reading, penmanship, history, geography, science, arithmetic, etc. So not only would I make an amazing housewife, I could add and subtract! Someday some guy was going to be blessed to marry me or my sister!

The one thing that cannot be taught is common sense. You either have it or you don’t but even if you’re lacking in that area, some of it can rub off from the adults around you…providing they have it.

I am blessed with common sense. In addition to all of those household duties my mother taught me, I actually know that if I were to walk into a bank and try to rob it, that would be against the law. From what I’ve been seeing lately on the news, some people haven’t figured that out yet.

So, this morning I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a video that stopped me in my tracks. At first I was surprised, then shocked, then couldn’t stop laughing.

A roving reporter-type guy was stopping people at large and asking questions. He stopped two high school girls and asked them, “If you drive 80 miles per hour, how long will it take you to go 80 miles?” The answer is 1 hour.

One answered 2 hours and the other one replied one-and-a-half hours.

I almost peed my pants from laughing because the dumbfounded look on their faces was proof that they have not been paying attention in school for the last 8-10 years. I would think that this would be something a 4th grader could answer.

So although I have more common sense than book smarts, I’m further ahead than those young ladies. They better marry well…it’s their own chance at any type of success.

And to prove that some of me hopefully rubbed off on my granddaughters, I posed the question, via a phone call, to both of them this morning. Both replied 1 hour. One is 16 and the other is 25! I’m proud!