Public School Education Prior to 1975

Wow, this one sounds dull as dirt, doesn't it? But hold tight, because don't I always offer you some laughs?

I am in a unique position to evaluate this premise. My public school education began in 1964 and ended in 1977. Spoiler alert: I didn't learn diddly squat about guns.

I did learn stuff, though.

I learned how to turn chicken eggs in an incubator so that the chicks would develop properly. By doing this, I learned that birds turn their eggs. This stuck with me. That was kindergarten.

Grade 1 I learned to love snowfall. The teacher let me stay in the hallway and watch a snow storm, all by myself, while the other kids had recess in the classroom.

Second grade I learned that being left-handed sucks. Cursive writing was a horror.

Third grade I memorized all my times tables. I understand they do it differently now. Rote worked for me. We had flash cards and practiced at home.

Fourth grade I learned that there was an author named Laura Ingalls Wilder, and that she wrote fabulous books about growing up on the prairie in the 19th century. Literally, I think all I did in fourth grade was read "Little House" books and solve long division problems.  Oh yeah! The teacher was so furious that none of us knew the words to the National Anthem that she gave us one night to memorize it and then made all 31 of us sing it, solo, the next day.

In fifth grade I learned that if you can't play kickball very well, you can earn props from the more athletic kids by being a fair umpire.

In sixth grade *spoiler alert kinda gross* I learned in health class that I had been putting certain feminine items on backwards. My mother never showed me.

In seventh grade I didn't learn much of anything, because my mother had a major nervous breakdown, and that made me irritable, distracted, and prone to acting out in school. I would have been keenly interested in gun use classes at this moment in my life, but I didn't get them. There was no gun in my home, at any stage of my life, and that's why I'm sitting here writing this today. I might be dead otherwise.

Eighth grade I remember looking in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature about a movie star and then getting magazine articles from the school library to write a report. It's funny how things work. I wound up making a decent living doing exactly that task, from 1984 until 2005.

In ninth grade biology class, I learned that eating a balanced diet every day makes multivitamins unnecessary.

When I was in tenth grade I learned that it's possible to fall head-over-heels, deeply in love with someone that modern society would bar me from pursuing.

Again in 11th grade, life was chaos at home, so I didn't learn anything. As with seventh grade, I would have remembered vividly having gun lessons.

In my senior year of high school, I learned a little bit of Latin. I wish I had studied it from freshman year forward. It's really great, and not just because of the bored gods.


So there, not terribly abridged, is my public school education! It did not include gun safety or gun use.

You know what? I'm going to tag this post with a "moron" label. Think about that quote above. In order to teach gun safety, there would have to be a gun or guns in school. That gun would have to be a common enough model to have readily available ammunition. For the love of fruit flies! What an explosive situation!

So, now addressing the moron who said I had gun safety classes in school, I reply most forcibly: Oh HELL no, I did not! The closest I got to a safety lesson upon which my life depended was in geology class, where we learned protective measures for exploring wild caves. Bite me, Mr. Gun Owner. There was a war being fought almost throughout the entirety of my public schooling. Three major political figures were assassinated. People thought differently about firearms in those days. Trust me on that, reader.