Notes From Gordon 250102: Remembering Miss Stack

ATTENTION SPAN NOTICE
Reading time: 392 words @ 238 wpm = 1 minute, 38 seconds

WHAT THEY SAID
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." — John Stuart Mill, (1806-1873) English philosopher and economist

Hello Fellow Sapiens,
I have been asked by one crafty reader what I intend to write about. Sorry, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Miss Stack, my 6th grade teacher, would have admonished me for that.

What a tough cookie she was. I was eleven years old and I trembled in her presence. If you started a sentence with, “I don’t think…” she would interrupt with, “That’s right, you don’t!” She would then explain alternative ways to express yourself.

One day after dinner she came to our family home and knocked on the door. My mother was naturally surprised to see her, instantly fearing that young Gordon had misbehaved.

She informed my mother that the U.S. Department of Education was trying to get her to to, quoting my mother, “teach this ridiculous new method of doing mathematics, and I refuse!”

As Charlotte Iserbyt writes in her blockbuster classic, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, this was the era in which communist elements at the top of the federal food chain began subverting public education with “whole word” reading and the
“new math.” And Miss Stack wasn’t having any of it.

This was 1957 and Miss Stack was in her 60’s. She would have been born at the start of the 1900’s, prior to electrification and the automobile—in an age when children received a real education and knew a wooden nickel when they saw one.

Thank you, Miss Stack, wherever you are. You did a great job. Oh… I almost forgot… let me correct that first sentence.

I have been asked by one crafty reader the nature of that about which I intend to write.

I’ll get to that tomorrow.

Gordon