Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up by Victor D. Brooks

district offices across the country, the surging birthrate was prompting a crisis atmosphere that would dominate educational policies for almost two decades. Unlike parents, obstetricians, and pediatricians, most school officials and teachers did not have to deal with the impact of the Baby Boom from the time of its inception in January 1946. It would be early in the next decade before the first cohort of Boomers reached school. On a series of bright, late-summer days in 1952, however, the Boomers and the American school system were introduced to each other in the educational equivalent of the Normandy invasion.
    A year earlier, school personnel had received a preview of coming attractions when a mixture of the youngest war babies and the oldest Boomers had crowded schools designed largely for low prewar birthrates. Now, in 1952, the first classmade up entirely of Boomers, the future high school class of 1964 and the college class of 1968, pushed public school attendance over the 34 million mark amid projections that even this staggering number would increase by an additional 50 percent by the end of the fifties. (In 1940 school attendance had been 25.4 million.) Unlike an enemy sneak attack or a natural disaster, the initial surge of children into first grade occurred with plenty of advance warning. But the heroic responses of a nation at war had perhaps worn thin in peacetime as half-measures, wishful thinking, and competing educational demands produced an educational crisis that at times threatened to spin out of control. For example, in the early 1950s the percentage of teenagers remaining in high school until graduation was soaring just as the Boomers hit the lower grades, forcing superintendents to create stopgap measures at opposite ends of the educational ladder. Semi-rural areas that had made do with a single consolidated school were now burgeoning suburbs requiring six new elementary schools at the same time. Low prewar birthrates had produced a meager pool of new teachers—just as the need for their services exploded.
    As late summer 1952 turned to autumn, a nation concerned with Soviet spy rings, a new addition to Lucy and Ricky’s television family, and the stretch drive of the baseball season would find it difficult to miss the media attention to the emerging crisis of overcrowding in the schools. Magazines, newspapers, and television news began running pictures of cute young children doubling up two to a desk, sharing textbooks, and jamming lunchrooms. Harried superintendents and principals showed visitors classrooms bulging with forty or fifty pupils, and predicted even higher numbers to come. Extensive parochial school systems in Northeastern and Midwestern cities dispatched nuns fromretirement homes and shortened training periods for young novice sisters to cover gaps in schools that often exceeded sixty students per classroom.
    While parents and school officials fretted over this classroom overcrowding, more than a few Boomer children saw the experience as a memorable adventure. Teachers might see row upon row of cherubic faces that created multiple opportunities for calling a pupil by the wrong name, but the children took the situation in stride. A girl alternately called Joan, Jean, or Jane, or a boy addressed as John, Joseph, or Jerry, realized that adult teachers were not all-knowing and teased one another with their “alternate” names, which brought laughter all around. Some Boomers adopted a sort of perverse pride in the size of their class enrollments, especially when the youngest students eyed the much smaller class sizes in the upper grades. The older kids might be bigger and stronger, but the Boomers had sheer numbers on their side. Some level of unique group identity may have been developing well before most of this generation had any idea what the term meant.
    Despite children’s lack of concern, adults saw these school problems as a major issue for the nation’s future.