Reply #51: For nearly all of my elementary school years [View All]

and my high school years I took a bus to school.

But since I am white and was lucky enough to be born in the mid 1940s to lower middle class parents, the schools were excellent. They were designed to teach kids how to learn not how to take standardized tests. There were ample extracurricular activities to develop the whole person. They weren't yet factories to train kids how to memorize and regurgitate the state's boiler plate idea of what EVERYONE MUST LEARN to do well at their little McJobs. When it came time to go to college the WHOLE me was evaluated not just my "grades" -- so I got in and got on the Dean's List.

Of course, this was during the ascendancy of the middle class -- no expense was spared when it came to funding (white) schools.

I was also VERY lucky because I lived for 3 years in Hawai'i. I went to Junior High School there. Unlike a white kid in nearly all of the rest of segregated Amerika, I had the opportunity to spend some time at a school where I was in the racial minority. The most important lesson I learned was that the White World was a shallow sham, that the racism I was immersed in (and couldn't accept) in the Deep South (and from many of the other military brats) WAS bullshit and that there were some good and some not so good folks and that skin color had little to do with it.

It's that last opportunity that is being denied kids of ALL ethnic backgrounds in the re-segregated Amerika...

That's pretty fucking sad...