Especially within a school setting, we are all potentially prisoners of language.
The first day of school at Wilson Elementary School in Fishersville, Virginia, in September 1964: it was a different world, although we didn’t yet know it.
I was beginning third grade.
Wilson Elementary was a red-brick, single-story, one-hall school (an extension would be built between my sixth and seventh grade years, turning the rectangular building into an L-shaped structure). It housed about 500 kids in Grades 1-7 (no kindergarten in rural Virginia in the early 1960s, and few junior high schools). It was an artifact of such a completely different time and American culture than we inhabit today that it is almost impossible to portray it in any meaningful fashion.
I have often told my college students that it was one of the only elementary schools they would ever hear about that could have had a student parking lot. In 1960s Virginia there was no social promotion yet, so it was not unusual for some of the sixth or seventh-graders to be sixteen, or even seventeen, years old.
On the other end of the scale, our principal took all the boys in each new first grade class to the restroom to explain how to flush the toilets and carefully distinguished between urinals (which many had never seen) and water fountains. “One is to pee in, and the other is to drink out of,” Mr. McChesney said. “Remember that all the drinking fountains will be in the halls, not in here.”
