Oh to be a parent in bygone days

[Whoateallthesoddingbiscuits]

Imagine the scene. You’re a parent of primary aged children. They bring home their PE kit once a week. Books and stationary are provided by school. They can take a non-specified pencil case if they want. Heck, they can even wear a yellow pony tail if they want instead of a navy one.

Homework might be a project on animals or transport over a term. Obviously, you’d still do things like reading, spelling, times tables. You can do maths or English with them if you want, without being told that there is only one way to skin a cat. If they know a great way to skin a cat, you accept it, rather than
confusing/boring the wits out of them by teaching them another ten ways.

There is no Google classrooms.
There is no email.
There is no WhatsApp.
There aren’t several additional messaging apps to check.
Instead, every couple of weeks there is a letter in their bag.

THERE IS HARDLY ANY ADMIN AND NO LAST MINUTE AD HOC REQUESTS

Food is fine, good quality local produce, but they have a taste for the bland. Housing varies where you live, just like the uk, but in my town you can but a flat for as little as 5k, and my detached house cost 80k - you'd find it hard to find such cheap housing in the uk! And our houses are warm, not cold and damp.

Britain has some very good schools, and a whole lot more schools that aren't so good, and many that are downright terrible (I went to one). In Finland they're pretty much all decent so you don't have to worry about getting into the right school and don't have all the ridiculous rules that British schools have so I know which system I think is better.

Well said.

I don’t agree about the schooling part tho. Schools are still better in Britain. It’s not perfect but still better then Europe schools

Evidently...

Yeah it has slipped down the rankings, largely due, I suspect, to the digitalisation of the classroom and attempts to modernise the curriculum, as well as the increase in students who don't know any Finnish or Swedish. Things are moving back now, back to books and paper (though they never moved away from those in my town) and less of the phenomenon based learning. And still does very well considering finnish children don't spend very many hours in school.

DD did come home once though with a black eye and I never heard anything from the school (she had fallen skiing and kicked herself in the eye)

It's early morning and I'm unable to determine if this is a wind up response or not.

My thought exactly. 👀

@Whoateallthesoddingbiscuits You do realise that safeguarding didn't exist and bullying was par for the course right? At times it was all a bit Lord of the Flies.

Still, it was good preparation for adulthood and we learnt how to do things for ourselves, unlike kids of today who seem incapable of functioning autonomously.

I went to school in one of the european countries that on mumsnet are often hailed as so much better than the uk (school starts at 6 - 7 years old, no uniform)

• in my class, you could tell from day 1 who’s parents had money, and who’s were poor. branded clothing abd - most importantly- the children from better off backgrounds could do basic maths and read/write a bit. Unsurprisingly, that gap only got bigger over the years. According to my cousins (teachers) that hasn’t changed. you know on day 1 who will go on to grammar school (only entry to university)
• We had keys and bit of chalk thrown at us for misbehaviour (that has stopped)
• School stops at lunchtime, but 1-3 hours of homework are expected and necessary . See point 1, with no parental support, kids fall behind. Still the same according, although some schools now have a homework club (not nearly all!)
• 30+ kids, no teaching assistants.

When my DC were at primary school my greatest wish was for just a week of school....one week without a phonics workshop or a dress up like a household appliance day or bring in five empty cereal boxes and a ball of wall day...just one week where I could send them to school without being expected to rock up at 11.20 on a Tuesday morning to participate in something or panic buy another sodding costume on Amazon.

I'm a teacher and agree with many of those things. However, there is a sniff of rose tinted glasses about this too, we got the belt when I was at school, often for something as trivial as not having the correct type of pen (we weren't provided with stationery). Lots of things were great, lots really weren't.

Most of that still happens now in a lot of primary schools. Communication has increased because parents keep complaining they didn’t know and no one told them about x. Despite the emails and messages and paper letters.

Very similar to me (1960s) - who remembers Sunny Smiles ? Where you raised money by selling a little picture of a black child to raise money for children in Africa? Totally bizarre nowadays.

I enjoyed my school days generally- the stuff we did was on the whole quite interesting.

I saw your title and I thought of the really byegone ages when you'd pretty much never have to parent your dc. They had to be seen and not heard, had a nursery in another wing of the house and got brought in by nanny to give you a kiss on the cheek. Get a bit older and they have a governess or go off to boarding or finishing school. Those parents would have got a shock to find themselves making a world book day outfit at 11pm.

What you describe is my parenting experience and my kids are only early twenties! Has it changed that much?!

Wow!

Why do parents go along with it is what I don't get. Mums are working much more than before you don't have time. Just sack off the school demands and leave them to cope and seethe! Are they going to expel your kid for having a personalised pencil case and scrunchie?

I remember the charity begging bullying as a kid myself and I used to just say no. All that sponsored wank was infuriating.

Imagine going to primary school in your own clothes, took nothing with you but a coat. There was absolutely no homework, SM or internet for that matter. All letters home on paper with purple ink. One parents evening a year, no discos, book bags, PE kit home ONCE A TERM and no bump notes.

But teachers could physically punish you and we all sat on individual tables in rows.

That was the 70s!!

I think the point of the post is the load on parents rather than what was good/bad about schools eg corporal punishment.

My youngest starts sixth form today. It’s a good day.

I was going to mention Sunny Smiles - I still remember them from the 1980s.

Absolutely horrendous when you look back at it: give the rich white people a pretty smile and you can have a few pennies to buy some food - like they were performing ponies.

I love Enid Blyton books (don't judge me!). I'm not old enough to remember the 40s, so I don't know how realistic it was - nor were my parents rich enough to even contemplate sending me to boarding school; but I love the setting and the descriptions of what appeared normal for (well-off people of) the time.

It's astonishing how much the Famous Five and the Five Find-Outers were just allowed to get on with by themselves. Obviously no mobile phones or other ways to keep in touch. If you wanted a meal, you knew you had to be back by the strict meal times; otherwise it was no big deal if you missed it... or stayed out overnight or for a few days!

As I say, I don't know how much of it was realiatic, embellished reality or just total fantasy.

What troubles me about the apps and payment portals and all that, is basically the same issue with technology in general - it isolates those who struggle with it. There is a certain irony in an education system that puts so much emphasis on inclusion and making adjustment for children (often to a point of disadvantaging others) but no allowance for adults who struggle with tech. Kids of parents who are not able to manage the new digital platforms are to some extent being excluded, they miss payments for trips, they don't get updates etc. Maybe some schools do this, but I think the parents should get an option to not use digital platforms.

It was like the original OP @Whoateallthesoddingbiscuits when my children started school in the mid 90s. None of the brutality that went on in schools when I was there ( they'd just phased out caning, but my brothers 'got the whacks' a couple of times) My mum said she had her knuckles hit with a ruler for a spelling mistake, and when she told her mum, her mum did the same with a wooden spoon.
I think perhaps the pendulum has swung quite far the other way.
Reading MN has made me realise how difficult it is for parents now. I have a small granddaughter and I see how complicated it all is as well.

Yes, agreed. I went off piste in my post too. It was definitely much simpler in the 90s

Sunny Smiles - good grief yes. It was for Save the Children if I remember correctly. Me and my friend were sent knocking on doors to sell them, because ‘people like buying from children’. Unaccompanied children knocking on strangers doors selling photographs of children. The mind boggles, looking back.

At DD’s primary school in London there was no uniform and no homework.

It was a lovely school mainly and I don’t think DD (who is now 15) has ever really got over leaving there into the grind of uniform and homework and testing and all the rest of it.

Sunny Smiles raised money for National Children's Homes but they were real children from the homes in the photos.
My friends always bought black children first because they looked so cute and we didn't have chance to see any in real life (North Yorkshire). Occasionally at school we would have doctor's working in the local hospital's children who were Asian and Asian's from Uganda.
It was supposed to be a positive campaign to give real faces to the children in care.