Tag: school

Boomers Remember the Time Before Title IX

Fifty years ago this past week (June 23, 1972), Title IX of the Education Amendment was enacted by Congress. It was Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana who authored the wording in the bill:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Women’s rights advocates were already marching and protesting the slow plodding of Equal Rights Amendment legislation. In a strategic move to avoid sparking public debate and further protest, the bipartisan committee asked women’s groups to not call attention to Title IX to let the senators do the work. As a result, the bill was passed without much fanfare.

Despite the fact that women had proven themselves more than capable of physical labor during World War II, decades of social mores dictated that sports were “unlady-like” and women should not be permitted to exert themselves in public. In fact, in some circles, it was thought that if women performed sports that required much physical activity, especially during menstruation cycles, they would be putting themselves in hazardous health situations! Still, the first women’s professional baseball league was formed during World War II, but it was dissolved in 1954. In the boomer era, attitudes were changing and feminist activism was calling for all types of equality for women, including in sports. Women could finally play in their own national championships in gymnastics and track and field in 1969; swimming, badminton, volleyball, and lastly, basketball, were added before Title IX became law.

Despite exceptions for certain sports at select schools, prior to this bill, girls and women had few opportunities to participate in organized sports at schools and universities. Schools, from elementary to high school and on to colleges and universities, had little, if any, budget for girls’ sports. According to Forbes, the year before the passage of Title IX (1971), universities dedicated just one percent of their athletic budgets to women’s sports. Title IX required them to match the funding of what was available to boys. Reports indicate just 15 percent of college women participated in sports in 1972, prior to the bill’s passage. Many universities did not sponsor a women’s basketball team at all before Title IX.

Coaching was another example of disparities based on sex in sports before Title IX. Reports indicate 90% of coaches for the women’s sports that did exist were male. It would be another 20 years before women made a significant mark in the coaching of women’s sports, but to this day, women still coach less than half of the women’s sports teams. Teachers and coaches recall that in that era, locker rooms were also a point of contention, as many venues built only male locker rooms. Since there were few women’s sports, there was (in their eyes), not a need for female locker rooms. Demand for equal locker room facilities were an ongoing project that would take another 20 years.

What sports were offered to women, prior to Title IX? Mister Boomer recalls that in his elementary school, there was no gym, and no organized sports. The local high school did have boys’ baseball, football and basketball teams, in addition to track and field and swimming. Girls could swim or join track and field.

It was President Eisenhower who first established the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. With memories of World War II readiness still in his mind, he became concerned that Americans would grow complacent and less physically fit in the boom-time after the War. Nonetheless, for various reasons, no programs of note were able to get off the ground during his presidency. President Kennedy “picked up the ball” and attempted to address the physical fitness of students. However, there was not a direct correlation drawn between physical fitness and sports, so the program — which concentrated mostly on exercise — had a moderate effect on health, but did not disrupt the status quo of the disparities between boys’ and girls’ sports.

What do you recall about the sports opportunities that were available to you, boomers?

Time for a Boomer Education Comeback?

Mister Boomer recently heard an interview with an author who wrote about the differences between the Chinese education system and that of the U.S. in an effort to discover why our country continually lags behind in elementary education surveys.

The author said that in China, children must obey their parents as the ultimate authority figures, and when they went to school, the teachers were the ultimate authority. Not even parents are allowed to question teachers’ methods or course study. While this cultural imperative imparts a strict discipline that is evidently conducive to prepping students for higher education, it sounds far more rigid that anything we have had in this country … or does it? Mister Boomer was struck by the similarities to our Boomer-era education.

Granted, things may never have been as disciplined as required in a Chinese classroom, but the way we rose through the school ranks is far different than what transpires today. First off, we were also taught to respect and listen to our parents, which, for the most part, we did. When we went to school, the teachers were thought of as an extension of the parents. That meant what the teacher said, went. If you came home and said, “The teacher hit me,” a parent might have responded with, “Good, what did you do to make her hit you?” Our parents would take the side of the teacher every time.

Yes, there was that corporal punishment aspect of classroom discipline that causes litigation today. Mister Boomer stayed along the straight and narrow, but he saw classroom beat-downs that would horrify today’s supermarket tabloids. It is doubtful that many people would want to return to that aspect of “education,” but it is a part of our shared history. Despite the threat of bodily harm, kids accepted teachers as authority figures.

This system sometimes broke down when there was a substitute teacher. Kids enjoyed giving her (teachers were mostly female) a hard time on occasion, though it was usually light-hearted mischievousness. Take, for example, one day Mister Boomer remembers: He was probably in fourth grade when the school principal came into his class and introduced a woman who was to be the sub for a few days. Immediately after the principal left, the substitute passed around a pad of paper and asked the kids to write their names so she could take attendance and get to associate the names with faces.

Almost immediately, muffled snickering could be heard as the list passed down one row and up the next. When it reached Mister B, he could see what the snickering was about. Enterprising youth as they were, most wrote their own names, but also added another fictitious one to the list. Naturally, at the top of the list a pre-teen boy had written above his own name,“Jack MeHoff.” Almost every student had joined in the fun, adding “Chuck Wagon,” “Luke Warm,” “Willie Makit,” and, in a rare bit of solidarity, a girl penned “Helen Bach” after her name. Mister B, feeling the peer pressure, added “Pete Moss.”

The payoff would come when the teacher called each name. Was she in on the joke or just clueless? Sure enough, she started at the top of the list, much to the delight of the class: “Jack … Mee-Huff, is that how you pronounce it? … Jack, where are you,” she continued as the class burst into laughter. She caught on pretty quickly after that and navigated the name land mines to conduct a regular class. There were no further incidents for the duration of her substitute days.

Is it time to return to a level of classroom respect that we experienced as boomers? Who can say, especially since so much has changed. Kids today are far more advanced in their course studies than we were, not to mention the influence of technology. Yet the U.S. lags down the list for education quality on the world stage.

What do you think, boomers? Are there aspects of our own Age of Innocence that can be applied today, or has that ship sailed into the annals of history?