I am fifty-seven years old. I realize that I graduated high school FORTY YEARS AGO. I’m old, thankyouverymuch.

I don’t have children. I have, realistically, next to no idea what they teach kids in schools these days, nor how they go about teaching it. I assume computers and the Internet are involved. There are probably apps that the kids are required to download to their smartphones. I don’t even know if paper textbooks are still a thing.

When I was a kid, we still used old-fashioned paper textbooks, and given that I went to school in southwest Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountain country, there wasn’t exactly a huge emphasis placed on keeping them up to date and current. True, I went to school in Blacksburg, Virginia, home to Virginia Tech, and my father was a professor of nuclear physics, but that didn’t mean our schools were were leaps and bounds ahead of those in the surrounding, much more rural, counties. Tech had been a comparitively small school until the late 1960s and the community still wasn’t used to having all those PhDs wandering about. (True story: the physics curriculum at my high school was so terrible that some of the physics faculty from Virginia Tech came in to complain about the crap their children were being taught, to no avail.) So, long story short, they tended to keep using textbooks until the pages were flat-out falling out.

I was in middle school between 1978 and 1981 and in high school between 1981 and 1985: the Carter years and the first of Reagan’s two terms.

We had health textbooks that had been published during the Eisenhower administration which focused more on the importance of keeping a clean, All-American body than on any actual concepts of disease and prevention. There was a whole section on the importance of not popping zits because it could and often did lead to encephalitis — BRAIN FEVER!!!

Our earth science textbooks treated continental drift as dangerous pseudoscience and focused instead on the “geosyncline” theory of mountain formation. Mountains were formed as the Earth cooled and shrank, so the crust would crumple and form mountains. Of course!

Never mind that bathymetric evidence of ocean floor spreading and magnetic evidence showing historical alignment of plates had been pretty definitively provided in the mid-1960s.

Then there’s a history textbook we were issued in seventh grade. No kooky theory or irrelevant detail was too obscure to include.

This included the 1903 “Heartland” theory which held that the nation that controlled the area east of the Volga and north of the Himalayas (in other words, Russia) would inevitably come to dominate and rule the world. Why? Because Halford John Mackinder said so.

Who?

Exactly.

Its academic rigor was irrelevant, though; this was the era when Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist hordes were lurking just over the horizon and anything that could be done to build up the Red Menace as a serious threat, was.

My favorite part of that particular history textbook, though, was the picture from the top of this page: “Representation of the different Ways to Everlasting Life or Eternal Damnation”. Some rando named Gustav Sigismund Peters (“America’s first color printer”) threw it together circa 1830 in all its Grand Guignol awfulness. What it had to do with teaching us the history of comparative religion in America, I’ll never know. But it was in our textbook. (If you click the hyperlink immediately above, it takes you to a page where you can zoom in on various parts of the picture to get a really good look at it.)

To be fair, though, my textbooks from back in the day aren’t that different from what’s used in certain school systems in the South, where slavery is treated with kid gloves and slaves described as indentured laborers with self-esteem problems, and where it’s actually illegal to mention evolution in biology texts.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad our textbooks were. Kids tended to get promoted regardless of their grades; I never did homework because of boredom and severe depression and I still got moved on each year. (On the other hand, my classmates who did do their homework wound up at Stanford, Brown, the University of Virginia, Duke, and so on. I wound up at the University of Georgia, known at the time for academic scandals involving the football team and not much else.)