Remember These?

Remember these?  

available from yesteryours 

Maybe you are too young to ever have gone to school and sat in one of these desks. Or maybe you think these older versions are "quaint."

available from antiqweeker  

Well, the other day I heard that a young teacher said that these would eventually be in a museum as "torture chambers"!  I beg to differ!  I spent many a happy day in one of these and I learned a lot.  But the comment made me think.

These days school children sit at a table, communal style, about six to a table.  Some of these tables are rectangles, some are circles.   The circle ones leave little room for table top work space because they are pie shaped and children sit almost elbow to elbow. Supplies at these work stations are communal.  Children share supplies from a pile or tray in the middle of the table. There is no room for anything else.  They learn to take turns.  Now this may not seem bad on the surface, but I beg to differ.  In the old desks, one had to learn to be responsible for his own supplies.  Your supplies were in your desk.  If you broke your own crayons, you suffered the consequences and used crayon bits for your drawings.  This taught you to care for your items. It taught responsibility.  And, by-the-way, Johnny got in trouble for taking something from someone else's desk.

I am sad that children today, may be learning an entitlement mentality and it is no wonder that our society is becoming more socialistic. They are learning it from a young age.  And it is further not a wonder that the entrepreneurial  spirit is being assaulted. How dare one be different! Are we to become just a part of the Borg,  a cog in the system?  For me, I still value creativity, individualism and old desks.  Just sayin . . . . .