The social studies classes at my school had students put on skits dramatizing the major features of a decade. I tried to attend these when they occurred during my prep period. One time, I watched in horror as the students celebrated the fifties and some attending parents pointed out how the students were dressed, proclaiming in a totally wrong-headed way that girls dressed more modestly in the fifties.
Modestly!!! I recall short shorts, even a song about short shorts; and girls in high school routinely wore decolete crinoline dresses. However, no one ever had sex, not even married people.
It’s attitudes like these that infest our education: we decide how we want things to be and then say that’s how things were. We teach our history that way but, for some reason, not science and math, as far as I can tell.
But if you wonder some times at my iconoclasm, it’s because I was raised in the 40s and 50s, graduating high school in 1959, and learned to despise that attitude because it shores up chauvinism, racism, sexism, no-nothingism, ignorance and prejudice.