BACK WHEN CORE CURRICULA MANDATED CONTENT:

Why am I discussing this eloquent old book? It is because of the particular audience to which this wise and amiable man was writing. They must have been open to mature judgment, to read, apropos of a satire by Joseph Addison, that "each man can bear his own burden better than he could that of his neighbors; that imagination is at the bottom of many of our troubles; and that we are more anxious to be rid of physical deformities than of deformities of the mind and heart." Who were they?

I picked up this book at a junk shop. There's a note folded in it. It is a handwritten invitation: "Dear Mrs. Montgomery: You are cordially invited to attend an exhibit given by the 8a class of 1926 June 18, from 10:30 to 12:00 o'clock, Room 8 of the Ynez School." It's no accident, that note. On the inside of the front cover, two girls, evidently sisters, have written their names: Virginia Montgomery, Ynez School, Grade 8B, and Marjorie M. Montgomery, Ynez School, 8th grade, 13 years. There's also the mark of an inked stamp:

Department of Public Education

County of Los Angeles

State of California

Alhambra City School District

Did a pious schoolbook somehow sneak its way past the constitutional censors? Hardly.

It's why I call this a Message from Another World. This book is the Eighth Year Literature Reader. It is eighth, that is, in the California State Series. Its frontispiece reads, in capital letters, "Approved by the State Board of Education." Indeed, Mr. Armstrong was the editor of several other literature books in the same series. The copyright date is 1917. The holder of the copyright? "The People of the State of California."

That was then.

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