In the pre-internet days, a research project was way more involved than Googling a subject.
According to my kids, school is much harder now than it was when I was a student.
My son and daughter might say, "Yeah, we know, you walked five miles to school - uphill both ways; you had to get up an hour before you went to bed."
Don't even get me started on what we had to go through to get a smart phone ... (ba-dum-BUM) I can mute them, if only for a moment, with two words: the internet.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not proselytizing for a return to the (ahem) "Good ol' days of readin', writin' and 'rithmatic." I'm simply pointing out how they have more time for learning because it takes less time to gather information.
In the pre-internet days when a student was assigned a research project, the process was way more involved than Googling a subject. Here's how it worked in the 'good' old days:
Many families had encyclopedias, so research projects typically would include the words "According to the World Book Encyclopedia or Encyclopedia Britannica...." But teachers would not tolerate what amounted to the ancient version of copy-and-paste. Students were expected to visit the library, collect lots of sources and cite them.
MORE: Vintage photos around New Jersey
Students would find a spot in the library, spread out source books, take notes on index cards and make copies of important pages on the copy machine, which would cost a kid a dime a sheet. Oh, we also had to learn the Dewey Decimal System because libraries weren't like bookstores with huge signs hanging over the shelves.
Our papers often started with a handwritten draft, which would later be typed on a manual typewriter. For us, the electric typewriter and Whiteout were gifts from God.
These are just a few of the things that made learning a little more challenging in the pre-search engine days.
Here's a gallery featuring vintage photos of schoolchildren and their activities around New Jersey. Be sure captions are enabled for all the information about each photo. And if you'd like to see more, you can click this link and this one.
Greg Hatala may be reached at ghatala@starledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @GregHatala. Find The Star-Ledger on Facebook.