Your title reminds me that in my senior year of public High School (1974-75), I took exactly one class: English.
The course was titled "Alienated Man - Technological Man".
We read many classics, including: Hiroshima; Slaughterhouse 5; Fahrenheit 451; Fail Safe; Clockwork Orange; One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest; 1984; Vonnegut's Player Piano; Mark Twain essays; (Kubrick movies); Down These Mean Streets; Dutchman and The Slave; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Black Like Me; Manchild In The Promised Land; Ralph Ellison Invisible Man; James Baldwin (essays); Langston Hughes poetry; and more.
That single class did more to educate me than anything else.
"Welcome my son - welcome to the machine" ~~~ Pink Floyd
Mr. Wolfe, you offer much food for thought. I am astonished, impressed, and saddened by your high school education. The first two adjectives I hope are obvious; I'm saddened because your experience is unique in my experience. I'd like to read the full story someday, but it looks from your substack account that you have more important things to do than write.
I'm certainly no writer - I blog mostly short policy wonk pieces on environmental policy and politics . I also sometimes post photos from my never ending road trip (I live and travel in an old short Skoolie), which I call "wandering the weird scenes inside the gold mine" on Twitter account.
My experience is that Public schools in the 60's were very good - they still taught history and civics (not yet fully unwound to "social studies") and I even had a 6th grade class in "critical thinking" where we would read The NY Times every day (this was during the Vietnam War, so there was plenty of propaganda to critique!). If a public school teacher were to touch on any of this now, they 'd be cancelled, fired or something worse.
Your title reminds me that in my senior year of public High School (1974-75), I took exactly one class: English.
The course was titled "Alienated Man - Technological Man".
We read many classics, including: Hiroshima; Slaughterhouse 5; Fahrenheit 451; Fail Safe; Clockwork Orange; One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest; 1984; Vonnegut's Player Piano; Mark Twain essays; (Kubrick movies); Down These Mean Streets; Dutchman and The Slave; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Black Like Me; Manchild In The Promised Land; Ralph Ellison Invisible Man; James Baldwin (essays); Langston Hughes poetry; and more.
That single class did more to educate me than anything else.
"Welcome my son - welcome to the machine" ~~~ Pink Floyd
Mr. Wolfe, you offer much food for thought. I am astonished, impressed, and saddened by your high school education. The first two adjectives I hope are obvious; I'm saddened because your experience is unique in my experience. I'd like to read the full story someday, but it looks from your substack account that you have more important things to do than write.
Thanks. I started and had planned to use the substack account for posting photos, because I don't have to size reduce them as I must for my blog,
http://www.wolfenotes.com/2022/07/steinbecks-western-flyer-is-back-on-the-water/
I'm certainly no writer - I blog mostly short policy wonk pieces on environmental policy and politics . I also sometimes post photos from my never ending road trip (I live and travel in an old short Skoolie), which I call "wandering the weird scenes inside the gold mine" on Twitter account.
My experience is that Public schools in the 60's were very good - they still taught history and civics (not yet fully unwound to "social studies") and I even had a 6th grade class in "critical thinking" where we would read The NY Times every day (this was during the Vietnam War, so there was plenty of propaganda to critique!). If a public school teacher were to touch on any of this now, they 'd be cancelled, fired or something worse.