Old school

When our grandparents went to school, it wasn’t like today. I will tell you how it was in my grandma’s childhood and how the food has changed over the years.

School

In the nursery school and the primary school, my grandma was taught by a nun. They were more strict, sometimes too strict she said. In the secondary school, she was taught by a ‘normal’ female teacher but the education stayed catholic. When a female teacher got married, they were forbidden to educate. Because of this, my grandma had a lot of different teachers. A nun didn’t get married so they stayed the whole year.

My grandma stayed at school until she was seventeen years old. In secondary school, she studied ‘housekeeping’ (learning how to knit, to sew, to cook, to clean,…). She had to study housekeeping because there were less branches of studies. In fact, she wanted to do nursing but her mother wanted her to study housekeeping because she found it more useful for when she had her own household. In the primary school, she had also to go to school on Saturday morning.

                                     Food

My grandma eats almost everything even gladly but once there weren’t so many choices of food. They had to eat the vegetables and fruit that were growing in that season of the year, now we can eat everything we want. For example, once, they couldn’t eat tomatoes in the winter and now we can. Now, we go to the bakery when we want to eat cake. Once, they had to do this throughout the week because in the weekends the bakery was closed. There were also things they used to eat but now, those things don’t exist anymore. For example a ‘kalissenstok’, it was a black stick that you had to put in water and then you had a drink that looked like coca cola but tasted different.