The Good Old Days

[JenniferJuniper]

I've enjoyed this thread and even came out of lurkerhood to contribute...

I attended public school in rural Louisiana in the late '80s through HS graduation in 1999. In elementary school we had annual Christmas plays featuring religious carols and a nativity. I vividly remember my second grade year, as I was the best reader and had the honor of reading the Luke 2 nativity account from the KJV (!!!) as the kindergarten class supplied Mary, Joseph, shepherds, and angels. No one seemed to have a problem with these displays until maybe 1993 when the one Jehovah's Witness family complained. Then we just had classroom Christmas parties -- an excuse to have cupcakes and avoid any afternoon work for the teacher, probably. :)

We also had daily pledge and prayer (student-led) over the intercom system until eighth grade (1995).

What is probably the weirdest "good ol' days" story of my childhood is that my high school had segregated proms -- in 1999. The events were even called "White Prom" and "Black Prom", and continued through 2002 when that school was closed. I wish I could say I didn't attend because I was taking a principled stand, but -- in reality -- I was just a dork without a date. :D

My hometown is a treasure trove of fundie stories I look forward to sharing. We even had our own Westboro Baptist Church wannabes who picketed Walmart at Christmas time ("Santa = Satan") and traveled to protest Mardi Gras parades.

Wow. Just wow.

And welcome.

[JesusFightClub]

Late 80s, I went to primary school in Scotland. We had religious assembly, a minister came in to talk to us about Jesus and how we all had to be good and help each other. We had a Nativity play every year (even the Muslim and Hindu kids did it, of which there were a handful) and dressed up in teatowels and one year my wee brother refused to take his trousers off to dress up as a shepherd so he was the only shepherd in regulation school uniform and a teatowel :lol: We had the Lord's Prayer up on the wall in our cafeteria.

One year there was Jesus Day where we had to "live like Jesus" and dress up and listen to Bible stories. We got to eat dates, honey and special bread. We also celebrated Harvest Festival and a minister came in and gave us a sermon and we brought in food for the old people. I remember mine was always a Fray Bentos steak pie.

Then I went to a much more religious school and we had Chapel and hymn singing and Scripture lessons and lotsa Bible.

High school, much less frequent religious assembly until we got a new Rector who was very religious, and thus began the Time of the Even Weirder Sermons on things like praying the IRA renounces Catholicism (???) and that all Muslims would burn in hell (in a school with a fair few Muslim pupils). I also got an essay of mine given a "no award" (fail) marking for being blasphemous. That was late 90s.

Not really sure what any of that means except I hadn't noticed that my entire small town and age group had turned into the Maxwells (if the amount of drinking, fighting, puking and low-cut tops on a Saturday night are anything to go by) and the Goodness of the Good Old Days, whatever they may mean for you, probably weren't really all that good. Even if there WAS a surface show of religion.

[clarinetpower]

This was interesting to read. I grew up in the northern US and my experience seems so much different than those in the south. The heritage around here is mainly Scandinavian. The Norges don't really like co-mingling religion and education. If you wanted to go to church or confirmation or whatever, you did that on Wednesday evenings down at the church. The biggest cooperation I remember was in the middle 80's when the school finally asked teachers not to assign large homework assignments on Wednesday, because that was widely known as "church night".

I have several Mormon cousins from Utah and their experience is much different, too. They even had seminary at their school.

We may have been classmates. You a Spartan?

[RachelB]

I went to Midwestern public schools as a child and teen in the 1980s and early 1990s-- a small-town one until age 11, then suburban ones when my family moved.

In the small town, there was just the public school. (There was a Catholic school 15 miles away, which my parents threatened to move me into for third grade, because I'd been assigned to a teacher whose class was going to be mostly students held back from the previous year. I was reassigned to the other third grade teacher.) We said the pledge daily from kindergarten to grade 2, but not after that. I'm sure there were some people who prayed silently before snack or lunch but there was no praying aloud. Winter concerts in the small-town school had a mix of religious (i.e., Christian) and secular music, with maybe a single Hanukkah piece on every winter concert. (The elementary school choir director was also the organist at the Catholic church.) My choir mate who was a Jehovah's Witness was excused from singing in or attending the winter concert, and my Quaker friends didn't stand for the pledge, but those were pretty much the only accommodations I ever saw made to non-majority religious practices, and they relied on children (or their parents) having the fortitude to ask for accommodations. Catholic students were excused for an hour each week for "release time," during which they'd have religious ed over at their church. I adored release time because the rest of us had independent study, quiet play, or reading / writing time while that was going on.

When my family moved to the burbs, there was a K-8 Catholic school, so in grade 9, the public school had an influx of kids who had previously been in parochial school. We had sex ed in 6th grade, 8th grade, and 10th grade. The first iteration was pretty much "sex can make you pregnant," but the later iterations talked about contraception and the role of condoms in preventing the spread of STIs. There was one boy in my 10th grade health class whose parents sent a note to the teacher opting him out of the sex ed unit, which I assume was done on religious grounds. Oh, and I had a friend (M) whose parents had some sort of conversion experience when she and I were in junior high that led them to pull her and her siblings out of public school and homeschool them. Biology class and earth science were the main catalysts, I think-- they didn't want her exposed to the Satanic influences of evolution, the Big Bang, and gothy kids. :roll:

So I guess there were little culture-war rumblings, but I missed the worst of the bullshit. (The entrance of professional busybody Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-MN, into public life was as a would-be school board member in my home district, so there was a whole lot of bullshit to be had.)

[nokidsmom]

So true! I saved big bucks by making almost all my clothes back then, and regularly made things for my mom, sisters, daughter, and mother-in-law. Nowadays, it's almost always cheaper to buy something than to make it. Sewing patterns have gotten expensive, and it's difficult to find stores that sell good-quality fabric for garment-making.

Until the '80s, virtually every department store had a sewing and fabric department, and each town had several privately owned fabric stores. Nowadays, I have to drive 15 miles to a JoAnn's, and the fabric there is geared more toward quilting, home decor, and crafting than toward dressmaking. And what little they have is nowhere near the quality of what I used to sew with twenty or thirty years ago.

Had to chime in as I learned to sew as a teenager and made almost all of my clothes while in high school and college. This was in the '70's and early 80's. Patterns were nowhere near as expensive and you had a lot of options for finding decent fabric in both department stores and independent fabric stores. In fact, I worked at Minnesota Fabrics which was big fabric store chain while in college. Agree it's real tough to find decent dressmaking fabric. Sometimes I luck out finding something at JoAnn's but otherwise, I shop at a local store that has managed to survive (they get a lot of designer fabric overruns) or shop online and hope for the best when I get the fabric.

[emmiedahl]

I am in my mid-thirties, just as a point of reference.

I went to private schools until we moved to a safe, small town in Northern California right before I began second grade. The reason for the private schooling was the crime and low academic standards in the public schools where we lived--sound familiar? It was in the early eighties.

At public school, we learned real science, real sex education that was simply awesome compared to now, and No God Whatsoever unless you mean studying Shinto when we studied Japan and things like that. On Fridays the entire school had a sing-along in the cafeteria. The songs I remember are 16 Tons, Dust in the Wind, and This Land is Your Land. We said the Pledge; so do my children now. Most of the people in my community were poor or into simple living, so we did not have a lot of stuff. But we *did* have cable for a year or two, and like many eighties children I had a steady flow of occult and violence on the TV. Consider how well something like He-Man would go over with OMM. :lol: Video games were just becoming popular and generally involved shooting something.

I went to junior high at a private Lutheran school with tons of prayer and mandatory church attendance, where I was bullied both emotionally and physically by other classmates. Many of them were sexually active and smoked, did drugs. Transferring to an inner city junior high in a major city known for crime was a relief, not due to the absence of God but the absence of those classmates. Our only religion there was the unit on Greek and Roman mythology and we did not say the Pledge.

In the early nineties/high school, I partook of all the decade had to offer and was really into the grunge movement before becoming a deadhead. It is surprising to me that anyone would consider that time morally superior to now. I remember more crime, more drugs, more sex, and being turned down for fast food jobs in 92 because someone else had applied who had a Bachelor's degree. As for fundies, I did not know of a single one until the 2000's. It was such a weird, fringe thing then, at least in the circles I ran in.

I dunno, it seems like the world is generally trending toward being safer and more user-friendly even as we push religion more and more into its own sphere.