September 11, 2026 • 31 mins
Tracy and Holly talk about corporal punishment in schools and student loans. Tracy relays her experience at the British Museum.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
And I'm Holly Frey. We talked about six Supreme Court episodes,
six Supreme Court cases this week. Yeah. We did not
do six episodes, although it is what I call it
as six impossible episodes. A couple of these probably could
have stood on their own as full episodes. There was
enough detail. A lot of the time when we talk
(00:34):
about Supreme Court cases, most of those have been mine
to research. And a lot of times there's a more
in-depth exploration of who these people were, what their whole
background story was, all of that. And since these cases
have not gotten the same level of historical attention as
things like Brown v. Board, there wasn't as much of that. So...
(00:56):
The two that maybe could have stood on their own
made more sense as this collection rather than just doing
one or the other of them. Paddles, man. Oof. I just...
I cannot imagine any person I know who teaches school today,
number one, ever striking a child. Right.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Number two, having an implied threat of a paddle displayed
in their classroom. I just, like, that's just not... Yeah.
That's not how any of the teachers I know today work.
Places I have lived, though, corporal punishment is still legal
in schools. In North Carolina, where I grew up, it's
one of the states where there's still a law on
(01:42):
the books, but as far as I know, it is
banned at all of the school board levels. Yeah. So
it's not supposed to be implemented anymore. Yeah, you had
asked me when you were first starting this one if
I had remembered similar things, and I was like, absolutely.
And I got to thinking, and especially after you sent
(02:05):
over the outline, because I moved when I was nine
from the Pacific Northwest to Florida.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
And I don't remember there being any... In the Pacific
Northwest schools I was in.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Because I remember having a culture shock when I saw
one on a teacher's desk in Florida and being like, what? Right. Yeah.
I mean, I was not this eloquent about it as
a kid, but I was definitely like, there is an
implied danger of violence always at school, like from an adult.
What is this?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah. We didn't read the part of the decision. There's
a part of the decision that's like, well, there's no
move whatsoever for corporal punishment to go away at schools.
And I would say that's not fully true because there
are still a lot of states and school systems where
it's legal. And then there's also the whole issue of
(03:04):
private schools being a whole other thing. But I would
say there is a lot more consistent messaging from things
like academies of pediatrics, teacher unions, those kinds of groups
saying that disciplining kids by striking them does not work
(03:28):
in the long run and is not good for them
or anyone, really.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
No, and it's weird because I'm sure you have run
across this, right? Like, you will see this issue coming up, like,
on social media. And there are always people that pop
in and go, well, I got beat and I'm fine.
And I'm just like.
I keep saying it in every behind-the-scenes, but please go
to therapy. I'm not sure you are fine. I don't
(03:54):
mean to tell you your business. But I don't think
that's great. And moreover, even if you are.
It kind of goes back to the same thing as like,
I paid my student loans, everybody else should. It's like, okay,
you got beat, but why would you want that for
somebody else? Like, I don't understand that. I can't remember
if I've said this on the show before, but when
(04:16):
I was young, my mom started putting, I really think
it was $ 50 per paycheck into a savings account for me.
And with $ 50 a paycheck, was able to save up
enough money for me to go to four years at
(04:37):
a state-supported school. I had to save up enough money.
I had to get summer jobs and things to pay
for books and spending money. So mom had tuition, room,
and board covered, state-supported school, four years. If I needed
more than four years or if I had to go
to summer school, that was going to be on me
or we would need to take loans. So I was
(04:57):
able to graduate from public school debt-free. That's what I meant.
Public college in four years, debt-free. That school costs like
more than four times more than it did when I
was there. It is not an amount of money that
can be saved up by $ 50 a paycheck anymore. And
(05:21):
I don't think children should have to go into tens
and tens or hundreds of thousand dollars of debt to
go to school. No, me either. That's another thing that
feels really messed up to me because I definitely remember
the whole conversations about financial aid for school being told
that that was good debt. Yeah, I mean, I definitely
(05:46):
had debt when I graduated because I wanted to go
to a private school.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Right. And....
Speaker 1 (05:54):
When I graduated, there were two big loans and my
dad kind of made the deal of like, I will
work on one, you work on the other. But it
took me a long time to pay that off.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
But I did. But I similarly am like, yeah, I
remember how awful that was and how stressful it was
as I was also like trying to start my life
to have that hanging over my head. Why would I
want to do that to anybody else? Yeah. That was
also the why I didn't go to graduate school thing.
(06:24):
I had applied to some graduate schools that were part
of state-supported universities where I would probably get like a
teaching assistantship, that kind of thing. I did not get
into any of those. And I cannot remember now if
I did get into one of the private schools or
if I was waitlisted. It's been 30-something years. But I
was going to wind up at least $ 60, 000 in debt.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
With a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
That big money-making job. Yeah, right. I didn't go to
graduate school for that reason. So anyway, I have a
lot of feelings about a lot of things that we've
talked about today. On a much lighter note, reading about
the school newspaper, The Spectrum. Yeah. The first summary of
that case that I read described the principal as deleting
(07:19):
the articles before it was published. And I was like,
how were they making the school newspaper? Because I was
on the newspaper staff in like 1993, 92, 93 is
(07:40):
when I would have been on the newspaper staff. And
that case was a school newspaper that was made in
1983 and the case decided in 1988. So I'm imagining
that their process for creating the school newspaper probably involved
manually pasting paper copies of the articles onto a blue
(08:04):
line sheet that would be sent to the printer. So
cutting and pasting for people who were not doing newspapers
during this era... you were physically cutting and pasting your
columns of print onto these things to send to the paper.
So when I read something that said that the principal
(08:27):
deleted the articles, I was like, there was no delete. Like,
you would have to... That key was not a thing. No,
you would have to pull the things off of the
paper and replace them with something else or just have
blank space there. That would not work. And it wasn't
until I got to the actual full reading of the
(08:48):
entire decision that I said, oh, right, okay, there were
two full pages of the newspaper that would be a
page front and back, effectively, that withheld those whole pages.
That makes a lot more sense. Yeah, because you couldn't...
I mean, that's the thing, based on his explanation of, like,
there was no way to get it to the printer
(09:09):
in time. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Like, re....
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Doing the layout of two pages when you have eliminated
big chunks of them would have been a nightmare. That's
a time-consuming task.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
It was a time-consuming task, and at least for my
newspaper staff, it was an all-hands-on-deck time-consuming task. Yes. And
one of my friends who was on newspaper with me,
I think two issues in a row missed layout day because...
He was ill or something. I don't remember why, but
I do remember us being very mad at him for
(09:45):
missing two consecutive layout days that we were all having
to make up for not having that person there to
lay out the pages. Next kind of offbeat thing from
the research on this was saluting the flag. Yes, thank you.
And how the flag salute was described as looking too
(10:06):
much like a Nazi salute. I don't know if anybody
still does this, but in the early decades of the
Pledge of Allegiance to the flag in the United States,
there was the Bellamy salute. I didn't write down Bellamy's
first name, but he drafted one of the early versions
of the Pledge of Allegiance. And it was a stiff arm,
(10:29):
hands outstretched, definitely looking like what we think of today
as a Nazi salute. At the time, the Nazi party
didn't exist. It had not adopted a similar salute as
the salute that is most known as the Nazi salute today.
But the fact that people were still doing a salute
(10:50):
that looked like that in the 1940s as World War
II was going on, I was like, wait a minute.
That's weird. That's a little odd. Maybe a different salute
than that. Or no salute. Yeah, I feel like our...
When I was in school, it was just hand over heart. Yeah,
it was... Our teachers would be silly and say, put
(11:12):
your right hand over your left heart, which is... Probably
only one in there, unless you're a Time Lord. I mean,
that you know of, maybe. Maybe some of those kids
were from another planet. That's possible. Possible. So, yeah, also,
I just personally find the Pledge of Allegiance to be
a little weird. And I don't remember if I ever
(11:35):
abstained from doing it when I was in school, but
I would abstain from doing it now. Yeah, I... Aside
from any, like, what the words you're saying, whether or
not it invokes religion, etc., I just, on a strict, like,
person who has watched horror films, get real creeped out
(11:58):
by children speaking in unison. I'm like, oh, no good
will come of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
My last random thing that I have written here is
just the Warren Court. Yeah. I would say that of
all the Supreme Courts, which are, you know, if you
don't know that they are usually whoever is the chief justice,
like they are known as that court for the amount
of time that that person was the chief justice. So
(12:28):
the Warren Court is my favorite of the Supreme Courts.
Sometimes I look at Supreme Court decisions and think that
the Warren Court was the only good one. I would
not say I agree with all of the Warren Court
decisions by any stretch of the imagination, but the Warren
Court is definitely the court that seems to be trying
(12:49):
to progress the country in a lot of ways that
other courts have been trying to do the opposite of.
And I have on my short list of things... the
Warren Court. I don't know if that will ever happen
because I don't actually know how it will tackle it.
I've also thought about doing an episode on Earl Warren,
(13:10):
who was governor of California before becoming a Supreme Court justice,
and his actions as governor of California, as we have
talked about on other episodes, were very different from a
lot of the things that the Warren Court decided because
he was governor of California in like during the removal
and internment of Japanese people and their citizen children during
(13:31):
World War II. One time I said that I had
speculation that one of the reasons that the Warren court
was so progressive was that he was kind of atoning
for that. And I got livid emails about it. So
I'm saying it again. If you want to send me
irate email about Earl Warren, I guess go ahead. Holly,
(13:52):
did you have anything else you wanted to talk about? No!
I mean, you know, it's a weird thing, the whole
idea of, like, how children have been treated and perceived
and legally protected or not through the years. Oh, sure.
Always kind of hurts my heart that some of these
(14:14):
discussions even have to be had.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
And I know, like, It is hard to be a teacher,
to be a school administrator. Like, those are jobs that
are thankless. And it's very tricky to even discuss these
because in some cases, like, nobody wants to vilify the
profession of teaching. But there are instances where, you know,
bad judgment has been exhibited. It becomes a very tricky
(14:41):
and fraught topic to me. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Anyway. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Nuance in all things.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
My first draft of the outline ended with the sentence,
in conclusion, children are persons with rights. And I deleted
that sentence. I don't remember why. I said it now, though.
There it went. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
We talked about Ashurbanipal and Ashurbanipal's library this week on
the show. We sure did. I really was. I don't
remember if this was before or after. I really hit
a wall in the British Museum because it was very
hot and I was very tired. And we had accidentally
(15:34):
arranged the day where we did not have lunch in
between our museum stops. And we were in an area
of the museum that's devoted to the ancient world. I
don't remember where specifically where I said, okay, I have
got to sit down and eat or I'm going to
(15:57):
lie down on this floor. Those are the options. And
then it was either before or after that that I
had become incredibly transfixed by this ancient library, which was...
really what drew me to learning about Ashurbanipal. And then
I was like, oh, wow. Also, ruthless is the term
that gets used a lot. Definitely apt. I'm not laughing
(16:19):
at you being hungry in the British Museum. I'm laughing
at my own thing when you were talking about what
section you were in. And I remember being there at
one point and my friend Woodrow was coming to meet
me who lives there. And I said, we're in the
room with the big giant head. And I just got
the like, typing not typing typing not typing and then
he was like holly that could be like 30 rooms
(16:41):
there are a lot of rooms.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah i'm just like okay i'm sorry as i as
i was reading about all the various assyrian art sculpture
material that's in the british museum i was having to
sort of think, did I see that?
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Or did I see a different sculpture that could also
be described similarly?
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Oh, right.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Also, we have also in the archive a two-parter on
the Parthenon marbles. I have a lot of complicated feelings
about the British Museum.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
And to the point that when we were planning the
trip to England, I went back and forth about whether
I wanted to go. Because, like, there are incredible things there,
and some of them are incredible things that I would
love to see in person. But then I also have
(17:41):
the knowledge of how so much of what is in
the museum has this very, at best, questionable history of
how it got there, including all of these library tablets,
which were just sort of sent without having been kept
up with. Some of that being connected to just the
(18:03):
priority of we need to get this. And then some,
the evolution of archaeology as a... Yeah. As a field.
I was kind of reminded of several years ago, Harvard
was doing an archaeological dig on the campus looking for
the Harvard Indian School. And Holly, you and I went
(18:23):
out there to do some video.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
A little video field trip.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
And.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
We were standing next to the area where when the
students sifted what they had dug up from this like,
you know, carefully plotted out area that they were excavating,
there was an area where they would sift through what
had been dug and see what was in it. And
in the sifted area was what was obviously a roof tile.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
And we had a whole conversation with, you know, the
professors who were overseeing this about how, like, now this
roof tile is effectively lost. Like, we don't know where
the roof tile came from. We have no way at
this point to trace it to where in the layers
of the dig, which square it might have been in,
any of that. And I thought about that when I
(19:17):
was thinking about, like, that was one roof tile. This
with the library is... roughly 20 000 tablets and fragments
yeah i'm curious while you were at the british museum
yes i'm gonna guess the answer's no but did you
chat up any of the staff i really did not
(19:38):
because i did when i was there last and we
talked about you know the need for repatriation and stuff
and i will say it was very refreshing they are
all on kind of on board but they're all like
when you're in it, though, and you realize how many
things have to be. sorted through annotated it's so much
(19:59):
you have to have a plan for how to repatriate
all of them that's not going to further damage anything
delicate that also will right ensure its safety they're like
it just takes so much time and we understand that
people want us to just give everything back yeah but
like it's a decades-long process if you want to do
it properly And I said, I guess I hadn't thought
about how long that timeline has to be. Oh, sure.
(20:22):
But I was very delighted to talk to them. And
they were always really, really lovely with me. And nobody
was like, why are you asking these questions? So it
was great. It was great. I, on the other hand,
was typically like, I do not want to speak to
anyone or be perceived or chat anybody up. I want
the inside scoop.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
At all times. Something that I did notice that I
had previously felt like was kind of lip service when
it came to the British Museum specifically was there's a
whole idea of we have made this collection that's accessible
to anyone. But the reality is it's in England. So
it's the most accessible to the people in England. But
(21:00):
when we were there, there were so many people who
were there at the same time that we were. who
were clearly from or closely connected to other places, speaking
other languages, you know, groups of people together who, you know,
maybe they live in the UK now, but are fluent
(21:22):
in some other language. They are speaking together out in
the world. And so that did not erase any of
my qualms but did kind of make me go okay
there are there is a there's a larger spectrum of
people here than i thought that then i just sort
of imagined in my head that there would be oh
yeah yeah yeah yeah a couple of other things that
(21:45):
kind of jumped out at me one is uh the
shift in how we talk about the origins of civilizations
Because when I was in school and even into when
I was in college in North Carolina in the 1980s
(22:06):
and 90s, there was this idea of Western civilization. You
took American history and you took Western civilization. And Western
civilization was this framework of looking at history outside of
the United States, but it kind of was a progression
of Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece and Rome to Europe
(22:33):
and making this idea of this is Western civilization. Today,
I would say the more common framework for looking at
this is world history, which is broader in its focus.
My college alma mater is had a big humanities focus
(22:54):
and a liberal arts focus for the curriculum. That has
also been expanded out from... It was not called Western
civilization when I was there, but it was a very, quote,
Western focus. And that has become a lot broader. And
reading through the research for this episode... And sort of
seeing the focus from much older material versus the focus
(23:18):
from things that have been written a lot more recently.
You could really see that shift in the thought process from, like,
Western civilization to a more global world history. There is
(23:40):
a book about this library. I have not read it,
but it does exist. It is called The Library of
Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia, and the Making of the Modern World.
That is by Selina Wisdom. That's W-I-S-N-O-M, not Wisdom with
a D. And I did read, I think, a couple
(24:01):
of papers by the author, and I think listened to
one interview. I did not try to read the whole book.
It's only a couple of years old. That was just
more than I had the capacity to do.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Preparing this episode. But yeah, that's another foray into much
longer ago than the 19th century were. I was delighted
that there was a reference to the possible hanging gardens
of Babylon. Oh, yeah. Because, as you may recall, we
talked about that briefly in our episode on hydroponics. Uh-huh.
(24:33):
This was a good reminder to me that I need
to finish resetting all of my hydroponic systems. Oh, yeah.
I'm in the middle of, like, big, long reboot of everything, which,
you know, since it's getting harder and harder to safely
purchase lettuce. Yeah. I'm very eager to go back to
just growing my own right here in the office. Yeah,
(24:57):
we shifted away. We were doing mostly leafy greens and herbs. Yeah.
And we had shifted almost entirely to herbs.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
And then all of the Well, and then we also
had an aphid incident that caused us to lose a
couple things. But we had gotten into a more herb-focused
thing right when all of that started with the lettuce problems.
And I was kicking myself for having harvested and eaten
(25:29):
up all the lettuce. Same. I was like, we had
spider mites, which are just persnickety as heck. And even
if you do all the stuff, sometimes they just won't vanish.
So I'm like, great, we're just going to pull everything
and restart everything. And I've been so slow about that process.
Partially because we do always keep at least four active
(25:51):
jalapeno plants growing because my beloved loves them. And also
I like to use them in cocktails. They're great for
mocktails if you are not a drinker. They'll still give
it a nice little kick of that same sense of
drinking like an alcoholic drink anyway those things are hanging
on man even though some of them are like the
mites have gotten us but look behold our glorious bounty
(26:14):
of fruits yeah so I'm trying to let those die
out but this is a good reminder this is the
universe going holly do the thing just clear that biz
out move those outside and let them live or die
we don't know what's gonna happen the thing we have
multiple of is basil yeah have a lot of basil
we always love a basil Anyway, I liked learning about
(26:37):
a person that I most associated with the They Might
Be Giants song called the Mesopotamians, in which the Mesopotamians...
are a band that is touring, and it's Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal,
and Gilgamesh. Those are the four members of the band.
I knew already a bit about Gilgamesh and Hammurabi. I
(27:00):
don't know a lot about Sargon. I don't know if
there will be a Sargon episode at some point in
the future. Do you know what I really want after
this episode? What's that? Because as you recall... I used
to work in cataloging in a university library. Oh, yeah.
I want someone to decipher Ashurbanipal's cataloging system. Yeah. Well,
(27:20):
some of it is a bit. Like, I read some
papers that were about looking at the colophons and what
they said and how there are specific annotations that are
used only on specific types of texts. And I don't know...
if that has been reconstructed into, like, this is what
(27:41):
the whole system looked like. It's possible that that knowledge
is in the book, The Library of Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia,
and the Making of the Modern World. Listen, I just
look forward to a new phase when not only can
we pit Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal against each other,
but also a new contender has entered the ring. I'm ready.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
I have a membership to a private library where the
classifications are Library of Congress and Cutter. Cutter is part
of Library of Congress.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Cutter numbers are the extended, like, CODA numbers of a
Library of Congress number. Maybe I'm misremembering, because there's two
different classification systems in use at the library, and when
you look for books, it tells you which of the
classification systems it is filed under. Now it is possible,
(28:35):
now I'm looking it up really quick.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
That if you are in, yeah, I always, Cutter numbers
were always part of Library of Congress. Yeah. There's the
Library of Congress Cutter table. I'm not losing my mind.
I am misremembering then what the results say. My curiosity, though,
is that because it's a private library, if they have
a section that is very specifically one thing, they may
(28:59):
do away with the earlier half of it and only
work with the cutter numbers. Oh, sure. You know what
I mean? Because those get into, like, really fine-tuning how
you designate where things will go on the shelf.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
I have also had on my short list for a
long time dewy as a person me too but i
just like i know i just don't i don't have
the patience for such a terrible man yeah yeah yeah
and i'm not a fan of his system i know
it's very good for elementary and public libraries i know
(29:35):
it is sure but it's so limited sometimes it is
yeah Just the dumb, just the stupidest thing to get
irritated by, but there we are. Anyway, we're all going
to adopt this new form that we're going to discern,
fully flesh out and develop.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
No, we're not. No, we're not. Well, whatever is happening
on your weekend, If there's a trip you're going to
make to a museum or a library or someplace where
you can find some knowledge that you haven't had previously, boy,
do I hope that's great. Whatever is happening on the weekend,
I hope it is going as well as possible. If
(30:14):
you're working, I hope everyone is great to you, both
your colleagues and any members of the public you may
have to face during your working time. I don't know
why I suddenly got a little hoarse while trying to talk,
but Hope it's a combination of restful and productive in
whatever balance is best for you. We will be back
(30:38):
on Monday with a brand new episode of the show
and tomorrow with a Saturday classic. Stuff You Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
And I'm Holly Frey. We talked about six Supreme Court episodes,
six Supreme Court cases this week. Yeah. We did not
do six episodes, although it is what I call it
as six impossible episodes. A couple of these probably could
have stood on their own as full episodes. There was
enough detail. A lot of the time when we talk
(00:34):
about Supreme Court cases, most of those have been mine
to research. And a lot of times there's a more
in-depth exploration of who these people were, what their whole
background story was, all of that. And since these cases
have not gotten the same level of historical attention as
things like Brown v. Board, there wasn't as much of that. So...
(00:56):
The two that maybe could have stood on their own
made more sense as this collection rather than just doing
one or the other of them. Paddles, man. Oof. I just...
I cannot imagine any person I know who teaches school today,
number one, ever striking a child. Right.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Number two, having an implied threat of a paddle displayed
in their classroom. I just, like, that's just not... Yeah.
That's not how any of the teachers I know today work.
Places I have lived, though, corporal punishment is still legal
in schools. In North Carolina, where I grew up, it's
one of the states where there's still a law on
(01:42):
the books, but as far as I know, it is
banned at all of the school board levels. Yeah. So
it's not supposed to be implemented anymore. Yeah, you had
asked me when you were first starting this one if
I had remembered similar things, and I was like, absolutely.
And I got to thinking, and especially after you sent
(02:05):
over the outline, because I moved when I was nine
from the Pacific Northwest to Florida.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
And I don't remember there being any... In the Pacific
Northwest schools I was in.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Because I remember having a culture shock when I saw
one on a teacher's desk in Florida and being like, what? Right. Yeah.
I mean, I was not this eloquent about it as
a kid, but I was definitely like, there is an
implied danger of violence always at school, like from an adult.
What is this?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah. We didn't read the part of the decision. There's
a part of the decision that's like, well, there's no
move whatsoever for corporal punishment to go away at schools.
And I would say that's not fully true because there
are still a lot of states and school systems where
it's legal. And then there's also the whole issue of
(03:04):
private schools being a whole other thing. But I would
say there is a lot more consistent messaging from things
like academies of pediatrics, teacher unions, those kinds of groups
saying that disciplining kids by striking them does not work
(03:28):
in the long run and is not good for them
or anyone, really.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
No, and it's weird because I'm sure you have run
across this, right? Like, you will see this issue coming up, like,
on social media. And there are always people that pop
in and go, well, I got beat and I'm fine.
And I'm just like.
I keep saying it in every behind-the-scenes, but please go
to therapy. I'm not sure you are fine. I don't
(03:54):
mean to tell you your business. But I don't think
that's great. And moreover, even if you are.
It kind of goes back to the same thing as like,
I paid my student loans, everybody else should. It's like, okay,
you got beat, but why would you want that for
somebody else? Like, I don't understand that. I can't remember
if I've said this on the show before, but when
(04:16):
I was young, my mom started putting, I really think
it was $ 50 per paycheck into a savings account for me.
And with $ 50 a paycheck, was able to save up
enough money for me to go to four years at
(04:37):
a state-supported school. I had to save up enough money.
I had to get summer jobs and things to pay
for books and spending money. So mom had tuition, room,
and board covered, state-supported school, four years. If I needed
more than four years or if I had to go
to summer school, that was going to be on me
or we would need to take loans. So I was
(04:57):
able to graduate from public school debt-free. That's what I meant.
Public college in four years, debt-free. That school costs like
more than four times more than it did when I
was there. It is not an amount of money that
can be saved up by $ 50 a paycheck anymore. And
(05:21):
I don't think children should have to go into tens
and tens or hundreds of thousand dollars of debt to
go to school. No, me either. That's another thing that
feels really messed up to me because I definitely remember
the whole conversations about financial aid for school being told
that that was good debt. Yeah, I mean, I definitely
(05:46):
had debt when I graduated because I wanted to go
to a private school.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Right. And....
Speaker 1 (05:54):
When I graduated, there were two big loans and my
dad kind of made the deal of like, I will
work on one, you work on the other. But it
took me a long time to pay that off.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
But I did. But I similarly am like, yeah, I
remember how awful that was and how stressful it was
as I was also like trying to start my life
to have that hanging over my head. Why would I
want to do that to anybody else? Yeah. That was
also the why I didn't go to graduate school thing.
(06:24):
I had applied to some graduate schools that were part
of state-supported universities where I would probably get like a
teaching assistantship, that kind of thing. I did not get
into any of those. And I cannot remember now if
I did get into one of the private schools or
if I was waitlisted. It's been 30-something years. But I
was going to wind up at least $ 60, 000 in debt.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
With a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
That big money-making job. Yeah, right. I didn't go to
graduate school for that reason. So anyway, I have a
lot of feelings about a lot of things that we've
talked about today. On a much lighter note, reading about
the school newspaper, The Spectrum. Yeah. The first summary of
that case that I read described the principal as deleting
(07:19):
the articles before it was published. And I was like,
how were they making the school newspaper? Because I was
on the newspaper staff in like 1993, 92, 93 is
(07:40):
when I would have been on the newspaper staff. And
that case was a school newspaper that was made in
1983 and the case decided in 1988. So I'm imagining
that their process for creating the school newspaper probably involved
manually pasting paper copies of the articles onto a blue
(08:04):
line sheet that would be sent to the printer. So
cutting and pasting for people who were not doing newspapers
during this era... you were physically cutting and pasting your
columns of print onto these things to send to the paper.
So when I read something that said that the principal
(08:27):
deleted the articles, I was like, there was no delete. Like,
you would have to... That key was not a thing. No,
you would have to pull the things off of the
paper and replace them with something else or just have
blank space there. That would not work. And it wasn't
until I got to the actual full reading of the
(08:48):
entire decision that I said, oh, right, okay, there were
two full pages of the newspaper that would be a
page front and back, effectively, that withheld those whole pages.
That makes a lot more sense. Yeah, because you couldn't...
I mean, that's the thing, based on his explanation of, like,
there was no way to get it to the printer
(09:09):
in time. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Like, re....
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Doing the layout of two pages when you have eliminated
big chunks of them would have been a nightmare. That's
a time-consuming task.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
It was a time-consuming task, and at least for my
newspaper staff, it was an all-hands-on-deck time-consuming task. Yes. And
one of my friends who was on newspaper with me,
I think two issues in a row missed layout day because...
He was ill or something. I don't remember why, but
I do remember us being very mad at him for
(09:45):
missing two consecutive layout days that we were all having
to make up for not having that person there to
lay out the pages. Next kind of offbeat thing from
the research on this was saluting the flag. Yes, thank you.
And how the flag salute was described as looking too
(10:06):
much like a Nazi salute. I don't know if anybody
still does this, but in the early decades of the
Pledge of Allegiance to the flag in the United States,
there was the Bellamy salute. I didn't write down Bellamy's
first name, but he drafted one of the early versions
of the Pledge of Allegiance. And it was a stiff arm,
(10:29):
hands outstretched, definitely looking like what we think of today
as a Nazi salute. At the time, the Nazi party
didn't exist. It had not adopted a similar salute as
the salute that is most known as the Nazi salute today.
But the fact that people were still doing a salute
(10:50):
that looked like that in the 1940s as World War
II was going on, I was like, wait a minute.
That's weird. That's a little odd. Maybe a different salute
than that. Or no salute. Yeah, I feel like our...
When I was in school, it was just hand over heart. Yeah,
it was... Our teachers would be silly and say, put
(11:12):
your right hand over your left heart, which is... Probably
only one in there, unless you're a Time Lord. I mean,
that you know of, maybe. Maybe some of those kids
were from another planet. That's possible. Possible. So, yeah, also,
I just personally find the Pledge of Allegiance to be
a little weird. And I don't remember if I ever
(11:35):
abstained from doing it when I was in school, but
I would abstain from doing it now. Yeah, I... Aside
from any, like, what the words you're saying, whether or
not it invokes religion, etc., I just, on a strict, like,
person who has watched horror films, get real creeped out
(11:58):
by children speaking in unison. I'm like, oh, no good
will come of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
My last random thing that I have written here is
just the Warren Court. Yeah. I would say that of
all the Supreme Courts, which are, you know, if you
don't know that they are usually whoever is the chief justice,
like they are known as that court for the amount
of time that that person was the chief justice. So
(12:28):
the Warren Court is my favorite of the Supreme Courts.
Sometimes I look at Supreme Court decisions and think that
the Warren Court was the only good one. I would
not say I agree with all of the Warren Court
decisions by any stretch of the imagination, but the Warren
Court is definitely the court that seems to be trying
(12:49):
to progress the country in a lot of ways that
other courts have been trying to do the opposite of.
And I have on my short list of things... the
Warren Court. I don't know if that will ever happen
because I don't actually know how it will tackle it.
I've also thought about doing an episode on Earl Warren,
(13:10):
who was governor of California before becoming a Supreme Court justice,
and his actions as governor of California, as we have
talked about on other episodes, were very different from a
lot of the things that the Warren Court decided because
he was governor of California in like during the removal
and internment of Japanese people and their citizen children during
(13:31):
World War II. One time I said that I had
speculation that one of the reasons that the Warren court
was so progressive was that he was kind of atoning
for that. And I got livid emails about it. So
I'm saying it again. If you want to send me
irate email about Earl Warren, I guess go ahead. Holly,
(13:52):
did you have anything else you wanted to talk about? No!
I mean, you know, it's a weird thing, the whole
idea of, like, how children have been treated and perceived
and legally protected or not through the years. Oh, sure.
Always kind of hurts my heart that some of these
(14:14):
discussions even have to be had.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
And I know, like, It is hard to be a teacher,
to be a school administrator. Like, those are jobs that
are thankless. And it's very tricky to even discuss these
because in some cases, like, nobody wants to vilify the
profession of teaching. But there are instances where, you know,
bad judgment has been exhibited. It becomes a very tricky
(14:41):
and fraught topic to me. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Anyway. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Nuance in all things.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
My first draft of the outline ended with the sentence,
in conclusion, children are persons with rights. And I deleted
that sentence. I don't remember why. I said it now, though.
There it went. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
We talked about Ashurbanipal and Ashurbanipal's library this week on
the show. We sure did. I really was. I don't
remember if this was before or after. I really hit
a wall in the British Museum because it was very
hot and I was very tired. And we had accidentally
(15:34):
arranged the day where we did not have lunch in
between our museum stops. And we were in an area
of the museum that's devoted to the ancient world. I
don't remember where specifically where I said, okay, I have
got to sit down and eat or I'm going to
(15:57):
lie down on this floor. Those are the options. And
then it was either before or after that that I
had become incredibly transfixed by this ancient library, which was...
really what drew me to learning about Ashurbanipal. And then
I was like, oh, wow. Also, ruthless is the term
that gets used a lot. Definitely apt. I'm not laughing
(16:19):
at you being hungry in the British Museum. I'm laughing
at my own thing when you were talking about what
section you were in. And I remember being there at
one point and my friend Woodrow was coming to meet
me who lives there. And I said, we're in the
room with the big giant head. And I just got
the like, typing not typing typing not typing and then
he was like holly that could be like 30 rooms
(16:41):
there are a lot of rooms.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah i'm just like okay i'm sorry as i as
i was reading about all the various assyrian art sculpture
material that's in the british museum i was having to
sort of think, did I see that?
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Or did I see a different sculpture that could also
be described similarly?
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Oh, right.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Also, we have also in the archive a two-parter on
the Parthenon marbles. I have a lot of complicated feelings
about the British Museum.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
And to the point that when we were planning the
trip to England, I went back and forth about whether
I wanted to go. Because, like, there are incredible things there,
and some of them are incredible things that I would
love to see in person. But then I also have
(17:41):
the knowledge of how so much of what is in
the museum has this very, at best, questionable history of
how it got there, including all of these library tablets,
which were just sort of sent without having been kept
up with. Some of that being connected to just the
(18:03):
priority of we need to get this. And then some,
the evolution of archaeology as a... Yeah. As a field.
I was kind of reminded of several years ago, Harvard
was doing an archaeological dig on the campus looking for
the Harvard Indian School. And Holly, you and I went
(18:23):
out there to do some video.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
A little video field trip.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
And.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
We were standing next to the area where when the
students sifted what they had dug up from this like,
you know, carefully plotted out area that they were excavating,
there was an area where they would sift through what
had been dug and see what was in it. And
in the sifted area was what was obviously a roof tile.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
And we had a whole conversation with, you know, the
professors who were overseeing this about how, like, now this
roof tile is effectively lost. Like, we don't know where
the roof tile came from. We have no way at
this point to trace it to where in the layers
of the dig, which square it might have been in,
any of that. And I thought about that when I
(19:17):
was thinking about, like, that was one roof tile. This
with the library is... roughly 20 000 tablets and fragments
yeah i'm curious while you were at the british museum
yes i'm gonna guess the answer's no but did you
chat up any of the staff i really did not
(19:38):
because i did when i was there last and we
talked about you know the need for repatriation and stuff
and i will say it was very refreshing they are
all on kind of on board but they're all like
when you're in it, though, and you realize how many
things have to be. sorted through annotated it's so much
(19:59):
you have to have a plan for how to repatriate
all of them that's not going to further damage anything
delicate that also will right ensure its safety they're like
it just takes so much time and we understand that
people want us to just give everything back yeah but
like it's a decades-long process if you want to do
it properly And I said, I guess I hadn't thought
about how long that timeline has to be. Oh, sure.
(20:22):
But I was very delighted to talk to them. And
they were always really, really lovely with me. And nobody
was like, why are you asking these questions? So it
was great. It was great. I, on the other hand,
was typically like, I do not want to speak to
anyone or be perceived or chat anybody up. I want
the inside scoop.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
At all times. Something that I did notice that I
had previously felt like was kind of lip service when
it came to the British Museum specifically was there's a
whole idea of we have made this collection that's accessible
to anyone. But the reality is it's in England. So
it's the most accessible to the people in England. But
(21:00):
when we were there, there were so many people who
were there at the same time that we were. who
were clearly from or closely connected to other places, speaking
other languages, you know, groups of people together who, you know,
maybe they live in the UK now, but are fluent
(21:22):
in some other language. They are speaking together out in
the world. And so that did not erase any of
my qualms but did kind of make me go okay
there are there is a there's a larger spectrum of
people here than i thought that then i just sort
of imagined in my head that there would be oh
yeah yeah yeah yeah a couple of other things that
(21:45):
kind of jumped out at me one is uh the
shift in how we talk about the origins of civilizations
Because when I was in school and even into when
I was in college in North Carolina in the 1980s
(22:06):
and 90s, there was this idea of Western civilization. You
took American history and you took Western civilization. And Western
civilization was this framework of looking at history outside of
the United States, but it kind of was a progression
of Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece and Rome to Europe
(22:33):
and making this idea of this is Western civilization. Today,
I would say the more common framework for looking at
this is world history, which is broader in its focus.
My college alma mater is had a big humanities focus
(22:54):
and a liberal arts focus for the curriculum. That has
also been expanded out from... It was not called Western
civilization when I was there, but it was a very, quote,
Western focus. And that has become a lot broader. And
reading through the research for this episode... And sort of
seeing the focus from much older material versus the focus
(23:18):
from things that have been written a lot more recently.
You could really see that shift in the thought process from, like,
Western civilization to a more global world history. There is
(23:40):
a book about this library. I have not read it,
but it does exist. It is called The Library of
Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia, and the Making of the Modern World.
That is by Selina Wisdom. That's W-I-S-N-O-M, not Wisdom with
a D. And I did read, I think, a couple
(24:01):
of papers by the author, and I think listened to
one interview. I did not try to read the whole book.
It's only a couple of years old. That was just
more than I had the capacity to do.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Preparing this episode. But yeah, that's another foray into much
longer ago than the 19th century were. I was delighted
that there was a reference to the possible hanging gardens
of Babylon. Oh, yeah. Because, as you may recall, we
talked about that briefly in our episode on hydroponics. Uh-huh.
(24:33):
This was a good reminder to me that I need
to finish resetting all of my hydroponic systems. Oh, yeah.
I'm in the middle of, like, big, long reboot of everything, which,
you know, since it's getting harder and harder to safely
purchase lettuce. Yeah. I'm very eager to go back to
just growing my own right here in the office. Yeah,
(24:57):
we shifted away. We were doing mostly leafy greens and herbs. Yeah.
And we had shifted almost entirely to herbs.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
And then all of the Well, and then we also
had an aphid incident that caused us to lose a
couple things. But we had gotten into a more herb-focused
thing right when all of that started with the lettuce problems.
And I was kicking myself for having harvested and eaten
(25:29):
up all the lettuce. Same. I was like, we had
spider mites, which are just persnickety as heck. And even
if you do all the stuff, sometimes they just won't vanish.
So I'm like, great, we're just going to pull everything
and restart everything. And I've been so slow about that process.
Partially because we do always keep at least four active
(25:51):
jalapeno plants growing because my beloved loves them. And also
I like to use them in cocktails. They're great for
mocktails if you are not a drinker. They'll still give
it a nice little kick of that same sense of
drinking like an alcoholic drink anyway those things are hanging
on man even though some of them are like the
mites have gotten us but look behold our glorious bounty
(26:14):
of fruits yeah so I'm trying to let those die
out but this is a good reminder this is the
universe going holly do the thing just clear that biz
out move those outside and let them live or die
we don't know what's gonna happen the thing we have
multiple of is basil yeah have a lot of basil
we always love a basil Anyway, I liked learning about
(26:37):
a person that I most associated with the They Might
Be Giants song called the Mesopotamians, in which the Mesopotamians...
are a band that is touring, and it's Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal,
and Gilgamesh. Those are the four members of the band.
I knew already a bit about Gilgamesh and Hammurabi. I
(27:00):
don't know a lot about Sargon. I don't know if
there will be a Sargon episode at some point in
the future. Do you know what I really want after
this episode? What's that? Because as you recall... I used
to work in cataloging in a university library. Oh, yeah.
I want someone to decipher Ashurbanipal's cataloging system. Yeah. Well,
(27:20):
some of it is a bit. Like, I read some
papers that were about looking at the colophons and what
they said and how there are specific annotations that are
used only on specific types of texts. And I don't know...
if that has been reconstructed into, like, this is what
(27:41):
the whole system looked like. It's possible that that knowledge
is in the book, The Library of Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia,
and the Making of the Modern World. Listen, I just
look forward to a new phase when not only can
we pit Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal against each other,
but also a new contender has entered the ring. I'm ready.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
I have a membership to a private library where the
classifications are Library of Congress and Cutter. Cutter is part
of Library of Congress.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Cutter numbers are the extended, like, CODA numbers of a
Library of Congress number. Maybe I'm misremembering, because there's two
different classification systems in use at the library, and when
you look for books, it tells you which of the
classification systems it is filed under. Now it is possible,
(28:35):
now I'm looking it up really quick.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
That if you are in, yeah, I always, Cutter numbers
were always part of Library of Congress. Yeah. There's the
Library of Congress Cutter table. I'm not losing my mind.
I am misremembering then what the results say. My curiosity, though,
is that because it's a private library, if they have
a section that is very specifically one thing, they may
(28:59):
do away with the earlier half of it and only
work with the cutter numbers. Oh, sure. You know what
I mean? Because those get into, like, really fine-tuning how
you designate where things will go on the shelf.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
I have also had on my short list for a
long time dewy as a person me too but i
just like i know i just don't i don't have
the patience for such a terrible man yeah yeah yeah
and i'm not a fan of his system i know
it's very good for elementary and public libraries i know
(29:35):
it is sure but it's so limited sometimes it is
yeah Just the dumb, just the stupidest thing to get
irritated by, but there we are. Anyway, we're all going
to adopt this new form that we're going to discern,
fully flesh out and develop.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
No, we're not. No, we're not. Well, whatever is happening
on your weekend, If there's a trip you're going to
make to a museum or a library or someplace where
you can find some knowledge that you haven't had previously, boy,
do I hope that's great. Whatever is happening on the weekend,
I hope it is going as well as possible. If
(30:14):
you're working, I hope everyone is great to you, both
your colleagues and any members of the public you may
have to face during your working time. I don't know
why I suddenly got a little hoarse while trying to talk,
but Hope it's a combination of restful and productive in
whatever balance is best for you. We will be back
(30:38):
on Monday with a brand new episode of the show
and tomorrow with a Saturday classic. Stuff You Missed in
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