CURMUDGUCATION: Schools And Other Shared Public Spaces

CURMUDGUCATION: Schools And Other Shared Public Spaces

Schools And Other Shared Public Spaces

One of my first jobs in education was minding the cassette player.

The actual job was assistant marching band director, and my duties included chaperoning the freshman/sophomore bus to away games. It was the mid-80s, and the "good" schoolbuses in our district had built-in cassette players, and the students brought their favorite music, vying for control of the stereo that everyone had to listen to. My job was to arbitrate those arguments (I quickly learned that the big hammer of such conflict was, "If you guys can't work this out, I've got a cassette here in my pocket that I brought from home..."). It was actually cool to watch them negotiate and settle these arguments.

Of course, the really rich kids had Walkmans, and by the end of my tenure, the cassette debates were over, and the bus looked more like they look today-- several dozen students each wired into a personal musical universe. It was peaceful,  but it was also without any of the interaction and cooperative decision-making displays of the earlier era. The students had found the technological means to carve a public space into several dozen private places.

That process has, of course, been paralleled throughout many of what were our previous shared spaces. I grew up in a small town, with one radio station that everyone listened to because that was the choice; only folks in big cities had choices between different formats. Top 40 was a mix of many styles, all jammed together on one list.

You know the litany. Everyone used to choose from among the same three tv networks. Three! They CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Schools And Other Shared Public Spaces