We visited a school the other day for a program and were surprised to find many of the things we remembered as kids to be completely gone! We thus wanted to put together a list of some of those things you simply don't see in schools anymore.
1) Identical Gym Uniforms. It seems as though while the uniform movement has taken hold in many schools, people have moved on from those baggy, high-waisted gym uniforms we all had to wear. Hit Next Page to see the rest...
2) Brown Lunch Bags. While it seems as though some kids still bring their lunch to school, they now bring them in fancy lunch boxes with all kinds of features and compartments. You certainly don't see the simple brown bag anymore!
3) The Home Economics Cottage. That's right, some of us grew up with an entire area of the school being devoted to Home Economics. This photo from the early 1940s gives a rare glimpse in to what these looked like.
4) Math on Dusty, Cold Chalkboards. There are a few schools that still feature the old-fashioned chalkboards, but what we've seen lately are either marker boards or these things that are fully electronic. No more dusty hands and that terrible scratching sound!
5) Going Crazy at Recess. The playgrounds these days certainly don't resemble the metal and wood structures of our youth. We'd spin as fast as we could and swing as high as we could and would head back in to school worn out. And we all survived!
6) Learning Baton Twirling. This one is a little bit random, but we certainly learned this skill in gym.
7) Slateboards Not iPads. If you take a look at the photo above and show it to a kid these days, they may think it is some early version of an iPad, so imagine their faces when we tell them that this is actually a polished rock that we used to write on!
8) Card Catalogs. Know how we Googled back in the day? That's right, friend: we used the Dewey Decimal System and found a book in the card catalog, then found the book, then had to look all the way through it!
9) Loud Pencil Sharpeners. Remember these? They'd be fixed to the wall and you'd have to walk up, put your pencil in, and crank as hard as you could. And remember that sound? They could wake up even that one kid who always slept in class.
10) Wood-and-Metal Desks. Back in the day, desks were so sturdy and heavy that they never moved! There was no putting desks together for group work - your desks stayed put in neat rows.
11) Handwritten Report Cards. They do all of this on computers and the internet, but we miss those old, handwritten report cards. We even saved most of them from our childhood!
12) Prayer and the Pledge. We remember having morning prayer and then the Pledge of Allegiance right after.
