SCHOOL DAYS

Classrooms and fashions change, but the challenges remain the same

Classrooms change. Fashions change. Courses change. (Does wood shop still exist?) But for each generation, even during this strangest of times, universal truths persist: School is challenging. It’s scary. It’s delightful. It’s dreadfully boring. We form friendships — and rivalries — that may last a lifetime. We notch rousing triumphs and suffer crushing defeats.

And whether we love it or hate it, school shapes us for the rest of our lives.

The Tribune’s photographers over the years have captured many of these formative moments. Can you recall being small and marching to school during your first week? Maybe there was a kindly crossing guard or several of your peers to shepherd you along, your heart skipping in anticipation or in a terrible case of the jitters.

And walking into class? To some, that requires taking a leap of faith into what feels like a terrifying unknown. Watch mother Bobbi Benning patiently coax her hesitant young son as he peers inside a classroom in Addison and perhaps fights the urge to run.

Then comes all the learning and the testing, years of it, with heads bent and faces scrunched in focus, as teachers make demands on young minds. Who hasn’t felt like that kid who watches and listens in the hope of enlightenment as teacher Marva Collins explains a problem to his classmate?

And sometimes school is a dramatic setting for a seismic shift in the way things have always been done — such as separation that’s based on race or sex.

During a mass boycott of Chicago’s public schools in 1963 to protest the segregationist policies of the superintendent, Freedom Schools rose up to give students a soft place to land.

When one of Chicago’s high schools was on the verge of admitting girls for the first time to boost its student population, it set off fierce outcry among adults and male students. But on that momentous day in 1971, the institutional upheaval came without any fireworks.

“(Two hundred) freshmen girls quietly started a revolution yesterday as Lane Technical High School dropped 63 years of male tradition,” the Tribune reported.

During these school days, so many highs, so many lows, so much uncertainty, so much knowledge. And hopefully, at the end of it, the kids are all right.

ROBERT MACKAY/CHICAGO TRIBUNE Marilyn Jensen teaches her first grade class at Lincoln School in Brookfield in 1967.

FRANK BERGER/CHICAGO TRIBUNE Student-teacher Cheryl Warren and the Rev. John R. Porter work with students at a Freedom School during a civil rights boycott of Chicago Public Schools in 1963.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE ARCHIVE Marva Collins teaches at Westside Preparatory School in Chicago in the 1980s.

TRIBUNE ARCHIVE Mrs. Peter J. Alt, the first Evanston woman to be hired as a school crossing guard, helps children across an Evanston street corner in 1942.

TRIBUNE ARCHIVE The Rev. John Mao, of St. Therese Chinese Catholic School, teaches “God Bless and Protect America” in Chinese to students in 1942.