My how time flies.

Recently it dawned on me that a decade has passed since I became a employee of the Powell Tribune.

I missed the anniversary of the January day in 2004 when I, a mere lad of 59, turned on a computer in the Tribune office for the first time.

In a belated observance of that anniversary, I decided to look back and see if I had written a column for the first week in September 2004. I wrote only four columns for the Tribune that year, so I was actually surprised to find that one of the four was dated Sept. 2.

Given the date, I wasn’t surprised at what I wrote, though. What else would a former teacher write about in early September except education?

In that column, I wrote about a 1954 newspaper article I had found in the morgue of the Basin Republican Rustler a couple of years earlier. That column told of a college professor’s complaint that the students he was seeing were poorly prepared for college.

Those high school graduates — who are approaching 80 as I write this — could not read, write or spell and had no knowledge of the basic grammar that is “the foundation of clear writing and intelligent thinking.”

The U.S., said the professor, “has descended into a Land of Sloppiness.”

That article reminded me of another I had found earlier that quoted a professor at an Ivy League school. He had similar complaints about the students he was seeing in the early 1940s.

According to that professor, his students couldn’t identify such individuals as Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, and confused poet Walt Whitman with Paul Whiteman, a popular bandleader of the day. Moreover, when asked to place St. Louis on a map, they placed it just about everywhere except on the banks of the Mississippi where it belongs.

Naturally, both professors blamed the schools for the situation.

Today, we’re hearing the same complaints about American education from colleges across the land, and politicians are continually bellowing about the state of our schools.

Liberals point to the shortcomings of the education as proof that schools need more money. Conservatives do the same to prove that public schools are ineffective and money should go to other purveyors of education.

Nobody recognizes that our schools are a product of our society, which has never come to a consensus about what we want our kids to learn in school.

Take the current hullabaloo over the Common Core Standards and the flip-flopping of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on the issue. Jindal once was a strong backer of the Common Core, and his state played a big role in developing them. Now, though, he has had a change of heart, a change no doubt triggered by the changing political winds, and is suing the federal government, which had no role in developing them, over the issue.

If we can’t figure out what should be taught in our schools, how can we expect our kids to learn it?

In addition, there is a tendency in our culture to be suspicious, even afraid, of education. Education often undermines our sacred cows and sometimes undermines ideas that we have grown comfortable with and depend on.

Science may challenge our religious beliefs or threaten our livelihood, and history may teach us uncomfortable truths about our past as a nation or call into question our political beliefs. How can we expect kids to value education when large parts of our society belittle learning?

Fortunately, those past students didn’t believe what their professors said about them. In that 2004 column I pointed out that the group earning the scorn of that professor back in the 1940s is now popularly known as “The Greatest Generation.

They may not have been able to locate St. Louis for him, but they managed to find their way to Omaha Beach and Okinawa under pretty tough conditions. The 1950s group whose college professor said they were incapable of intelligent reasoning helped build the interstate highway system and land Neil Armstrong and company on the moon.

I believe those who denounce our schools today are wrong as well.

I think today’s students will find a way to learn what they need in school and most of them will use their education to live useful lives and help move our nation forward.

But, if history is any guide, they will also belittle the education the next generation is receiving in those future days.

Fortunately, they will also be wrong.