In my public school years, I knew a guy who was a year older than me. We were in the same class because somewhere in the early grades, he had been held back a year.

I was aware of this, although I can no longer remember how I knew it. I didn’t know the exact reason he was held back, or the subjects for which he was held back. It never mattered to me. We were friends and that was good enough. The subject didn’t come up.

This probably sounds very old-fashioned to today’s school-age generation (we were also paddled occasionally by the principal, but that’s another column for a different time).

I didn’t grow up in Utah, but schools here and in most of the nation have, for years now, automatically passed kids to the next grade, regardless of how well they mastered subjects in the previous gr

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