We started school back in the Middle Eisenhower Period, toddlers’ paws in ours, crossing at the marked intersection under the stern benignity of good Officer Riley, who was doomed a dozen years later to become bad pig cop to a lot of those kids—we always called them kids then—to whom he taught survival. The 1960’s were lurking out there, though we didn’t suspect it, of course, never guessed at the future of hair, grass, Beatles, cop hate, Vietnam, televised state murders waiting out there in the future to shame us and shape the people our toddlers were going to become.
We didn’t suspect then that they were going to become people. That was something else we had to learn, and the learning was hard, because—well, they were kids. In the Middle Eisenhower Period kids were really the point of life.
We were all young then, if I recall correctly. “Young marrieds,” we were called, and we had “kids,” and we enjoyed “togetherness,” just us young marrieds, and kids. Pregnancies were as commonplace as Volkswagens are now. And you went to cookouts with other young marrieds, a lot of them pregnant, and burned beefsteak, drank martinis and talked about the kids.
So we were primed for school. Slim, young, unwrinkled about the eyes, unfallen about the waist, undisillusioned about the nature of happiness, we gave our kids to schools at the ages of five and six, with achievement-minded parents pushing four-year-olds to start cutting the mustard in nursery school, get a jump on admission into Vassar, Yale, Radcliffe.
I think—this has been a long time ago, remember, but I think we expected school only to process those kids—that is, swell them a bit in size and add social poise without really changing them from kids, the point of our lives, into something alarming, as school did. They were fated to become people, alas, and they did it without our even noticing for the longest while.
Later, when the famous sixties began to get brutal, we discovered it with shock or sadness mostly, I suppose. “Look what they’ve done to our kids!” we must have screamed silently. “They’ve turned them into ordinary, disagreeable, impossible people just like everybody else!”
We were so distracted by what had happened to the kids that we failed to notice that we young marrieds had also become something else. A lot of us probably took longer to discover that than to learn that our kids had been led away by pipers. Electric guitarists, to update the myth.
We had lost track of time’s pace in that struggle to get the kids safely through school, securely honor-rolled, safely SAT’ed, firmly admitted into Harvard for a secure future which would recapitulate our own eternal young marriedhood.
School had subtly aged us. It worked silently, like carbon monoxide in a closed garage, taking the life out of us without giving us the slightest reason for suspicion. It is hard to explain the process.
We met Dick, Jane, Sally and Spot with tolerant amusement at first, but those who had three or four kids—and who didn’t in those days?—must have begun to age quickly on second and third meeting, particularly since the oldest kid by that time would probably have moved on to “new math.”
We discovered too late that American education had decayed since our own experience of it. Teaching of mathematics seemed to be left entirely to parents. Teaching of Latin had ceased entirely, so that the teaching of English, which had never been very good anyhow, had become almost impossible.
As those dear toy kids, the point of our lives, moved ahead into uncharted depths of pedagogical incompetence, we with dreams of our eternal kids going on to the great expense-account colleges in order to become tremendous college-trained kids worthy of us young marrieds—we sensed it all slipping away. The schools couldn’t even teach them to spell, much less parse a sentence, frame a paragraph, distinguish Hector from Achilles.
We gritted our teeth, cursed those teachers, drove those kids and aged. Meanwhile, back at the schoolhouse, the sophomore class spent afternoons sappy on marijuana in the French class.
By the late 1960’s, when the first wave of the kids was finishing high school, we young marrieds knew all right—boy, did we know!—that the kids had turned into people. Now, this week at our house, the last of the people who used to be our kids is finishing high school, and most of us who will sit there in the heat for the last commencement speech know the rest of the truth.
We young marrieds have become somebody else, too. We feel it in the knees when we start to stand after sitting too long, which, like the wheezing and lower martini capacity, is discouraging. The better side of the coin compensates for that. Whoever we are now, most of us have probably learned that it is better to have people than kids, that people, in fact, are much easier to live with, once you grow up and quit screaming at them for not being kids anymore.
Gaudeamus igitur!