School was 9:00 to 4:00, and there were four grades taught in each room. That was only because the district had "consolidated." When I transferred there for the last few weeks of the fifth grade, all eight grades were in one room, one grade for each row of desks, so for slightly more than four years I had the same teacher.
That was the late 40s. The good years, with the war over, new cars available again, the economy booming as never before in spite of a top marginal income tax rate of 90%. But also the bad old days in many ways. Cruel and blatant discrimination for one. When our old warhorse of a teacher, Mrs. Brackman, told of having taught where there were "two little Catholic kids" in her class, it was as though she were speaking of a different species.
I caught hell (she'd have slapped me for saying "hell") for using the word "belly" in front of some girls on the playground. It didn't matter that our agriculture textbooks used the word frequently. Agriculture was a core subject starting in the sixth grade; the curriculum was built on the assumption that a majority of students would stop school after the eighth grade and pursue life on farms. Three miles away, in an actual city, grade school students instead were systematically prepared for high school. Those agriculture textbooks referred to breeding, and even artificial insemination, and calving...real "facts of life" stuff, except that it didn't refer to humans. Mrs. Brackman was incredibly naive if she didn't realize that most of her students had put two and two together by the time they learned to read. We speculated that she'd have a heart attack if she knew what her students were learning in haylofts, on blankets in cornfields, and in the beds of pickups.
Of course saying "shit" was a major offense, and the "f-word" probably would have merited an expulsion. One of the more timid kids in the school evoked the old bat's wrath by saying "doo-doo" as an expletive. Words were terribly important, it seems, but not grammar, although teaching us proper grammar was part of her job. She routinely said "hisself" instead of himself, and didn't know a conjunction from a preposition, regardless of how many times she'd taught the difference to students.
That was also the bad old days for religious freedom. Along with a daily storybook reading, during which she re-worded, often in a comically awkward way, any sentences she did not find "pure" enough for her students, there was a daily Bible reading. King James version, the "real Bible," she called it. Any discussion of the meaning had to conform to Brackman's own particular brand of evangelical protestantism.
Anyone who listens to many of my favorite harangues will, sooner or later, hear me say that Bible thumpers usually only know a few bits of the Bible themselves, and that they handily ignore anything that would be inconvenient for them. For example, they quote a passage from Leviticus to prove what they believe to be a blanket condemnation of any form of homosexuality, but ignore the many passages in Leviticus in which societies are commanded to care for the poor, sick, and disabled, priorities that many of them would label "socialist."
I could argue that when Paul of Tarsus, also known as St. Paul or The Apostle Paul, uses the term "I count it as dung," the modern interpretation of that would be "it's a bunch of shit." That's what dung means. It's just that one word evolved into a vulgarism and the other into common usage.
That's not all bad. The Bible is an important book, and there is much to be learned from it. Its value is increased, I believe, when we look at it realistically, realizing that those who assembled its writings were fallible humans, like us. When anyone says that the Bible is 100% error free, he's actually saying that a group of Jewish rabbis were infallible when, in the first few centuries CE, they assembled what Christians call the Old Testament, and that the Catholic Church was infallible not the first, or second or third time, but the last time that it decreed which writings were to be included in the New Testament. Believing in the Bible's infallibility also requires suspending rational judgement, which most psychologists don't recommend, since the Bible contradicts itself hundreds of times.
It's much more exciting to see it as a dynamic work, an amalgam of wisdom from many cultures, that evolved over time, and to see those who wrote it and assembled it as real human beings. Reading the book of Genesis to disprove the reality of evolution or calculate the age of the earth only promotes ignorance; reading it for rich lessons in human weakness and strength, the dangers of yielding to temptation and being dominated by envy, is what can bring us and our societies a little closer to the "Kingdom of Heaven." As a respected spiritual leader once told me "it's very important to take the Bible seriously, but that doesn't mean taking it literally." Jesus' story of the good Samaritan (the Samaritans were a generally despised people, but only a Samaritan chose to do the righteous thing) wasn't meant as a report of recent news. It was fiction, but fiction with a lesson.
I was reminded of that parable when hearing the report of a woman driving through southwest Michigan after midnight and having a blowout on the interstate. She was unable to change the wheel, frightened, and alone, and the 911 dispatcher by some strange reasoning didn't consider it an emergency. She was terrified when group of tough-looking men on motorcycles stopped, fearing that she was about to be gang-raped and robbed, perhaps even killed. Instead the bikers did their best to reassure her that she was in no danger from them. They changed the wheel for her, loaded the flat in her trunk, then followed her, like guardian angels, to the next town large enough for her to get a room overnight and find tire repair the next morning. She offered to pay them for their trouble, but they refused, then joked that they might not turn down some good whiskey if she had some.
Good Samaritan, good bikers. Good story. Gave me a catch in my throat, but I'm a bit sentimental at times.
Ah yes, the Bible. Written by normal humans, who even used coarse language deliberately. If you didn't know about this website, please write it down:
BibleGateway.com.
You can use it to look up any scripture in various versions of the Bible, and search by topic and keyword also. That's what I did earlier today after my son Karl, who doesn't miss much, sent me a heads-up on a different topic. As expected, I found this passage:
So and more also do God unto the enemies of David, if I leave of all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall. (Samuel I, 25:22)
Pisseth??? The awful "p-word," except conjugated according to the English rules of King James' time??? And there are five more verses in that "real Bible" that the old witch read from using the exact same word. The one for which she would have sent me home with a note for my parents.
Thinking about that, I'm not sure whether to laugh, or tell you that verily, it pisseth me off.