What was going on when I was born?

THE indicators of the public schools' academic achievement have risen dramatically in 1982, but the public still thinks the public schools are failing. The year about to end may well have been the schools' most successful in several decades, but at the same time, they face severe cutbacks in financial support from all sources - local, state and Federal. The colleges, which have doubled their enrollments in the last 15 years and opened the doors to greater numbers of women and minorities than in any previous period, are reporting the first signs of economic barriers that may block the way to deserving but indigent candidates. Such contradictory trends alarm many observers who, in recent years, have been exhorting the schools to toughen their standards and promising that such self-improvement would insure strong new public support. It now appears that even though the schools in many places have kept their side of the bargain, the rewards are lagging. In New York City, for example, fiscal austerity threatens to hit schools harder than other public services. In higher education nationwide, the elite colleges recently reported a reduction by more than a third in the number of students from low-income families in the last two years.

New York City traffic officials said yesterday that they were concerned about the effects of new Federal regulations permitting double trailer trucks more than 75 feet long on many of the city's crowded streets, but that they would comply with the law. The officials said they feared that the new rules would lead to increased congestion and additional accidents. ''I think there is a safety problem because of the narrowness of some streets in New York City,'' said Arthur Asserson, an assistant commissioner with the City Transportation Department. ''We have a hard enough time moving any vehicle through some districts, especially business districts.''

For more than a year, Charles Flynn, a salesman, and his wife, Deirdre, a bookkeeper, saved money against the day when mortgage rates fell. Several weeks ago they stopped waiting and decided to buy a $120,000 town house in suburban Orange County. ''Our payments will be over $900 a month,'' Mr. Flynn said, ''but six months ago the payments would have been almost $1,300. We decided we'd better buy now before interest and prices went up again.''

Mayor Koch announced yesterday a new crackdown on illegally parked cars that clog midtown Manhattan streets. He said the city would seek to increase fines, reduce the number of spaces for diplomats' cars, use a forklift truck where a tow truck won't do, and - for the first time - issue points against drivers' licenses for illegal parking. In addition, the Mayor said the city would begin enforcing a regulation that requires taxicab drivers to pull within 12 inches of a curb when picking up or discharging passengers in midtown. A spokesman for the taxi industry said that drivers would try to abide by the regulation but that passengers were often the problem.

Inside, the vast windowless factory is eerily silent and clean. The dominant colors are pastel shades of purple, yellow and green. With only a soft crunch, a 1,500-ton Weingartner press transforms a sheet of steel into the recognizable shape of a car door. Mechanical hands wisk it away onto the production line where 150 robot-welding machines, swaying and snapping like giant praying mantises, gradually build it into another Corsa, General Motors' belated competitor for a share in Europe's important small-car market.

The Department of the Interior announced today that hundreds of thousands of acres managed by its Bureau of Land Management would be dropped as possible Federal wilderness areas. The department also said that it would carry out another inventory of millions of other acres to see if they should be eliminated from consideration as potential wilderness areas. Most of the acreage in both groups is in the West and Southwest. The ruling by the solicitor's office of the Interior Department said that the lands would not automatically be opened to ''multiple use,'' which could include such things as mining, lumbering or other nonwilderness uses, and that they could someday be considered again for the wilderness system. Some might be considered for other special status, such as scenic areas or historic trails, department officials said.

The ghost of Christmas presents came to haunt the Consumer Affairs Department yesterday. While much of city government was becalmed in the four-day week between holidays, the nine people who take complaints at the consumer agency were busy. Sanitation workers were also working hard. An extra 2,500 of them were out on Sunday carting off Christmas remnants.

THE ancient Greeks, who regarded disease as an imbalance of ''humors,'' believed fever cured the sick by cooking the bad humors and helping the body get rid of them. The notion of fever as beneficial persisted for more than 2,000 years, and countless patients were actually treated with ''fever therapy'' to aid their recovery from such ailments as syphilis, tuberculosis and even mania. Then, in the mid-1800's, aspirin compounds that rapidly reduced fevers became commercially available and the medical view of fever changed abruptly. For the next hundred years, physicians and patients focused on bringing down fevers, sometimes with such drastic measures as cold baths and alcohol rubs. Now, the view of fever is undergoing yet another about-face, thanks to recent research that has in essence documented the benefits suspected by the Greeks. Fever, the studies indicate, evolved at least 300 million years ago in cold-blooded vertebrates as a means of helping the body fight off invading organisms.

Over the strong objections of the Federal Reserve Board and threats by the Fed of protracted legal action, the Dreyfus Corporation made the purchase yesterday of the Lincoln State Bank of East Orange, a tiny New Jersey organization with assets of $29 million. The acquisition, which cost Dreyfus about $2.7 million, is the first direct move by a securities firm into the commercial banking business. Federal law prohibits securities firms and commercial banks from engaging in one another's business. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, however, did not act to stop the acquisition, although it could have done so. The Fed has threatened to sue the F.D.I.C. over the matter.

An article in SportsMonday yesterday about Don Strock of the Miami Dolphins was accompanied by an incorrect picture.

International Yuri V. Andropov is the first leader of the Soviet Union since Lenin to have lived abroad. Mr. Andropov served in the Soviet Embassy in Budapest from 1953 to 1957, at the time of the Hungarian uprising. Some Hungarians recall him as a shrewd, calculating official. (Page A1, Columns 1-2.) The Kremlin declared an amnesty for convicts to mark the 60th anniversary of the formal merger of republics into the Soviet Union, but the wording of the decree indicated that it excluded those convicted of political offenses and a wide variety of other crimes considered serious. (A9:1-3.)

In a renewed effort to find a solution in the disappearance of Etan Patz, the Police Department assigned eight detectives yesterday to work full time on the case. The search for Etan, who disappeared three and a half years ago in Lower Manhattan at the age of 6, was apparently at an impasse when police officials said new leads - a photograph and a witness - were uncovered this month. Inspector Francis Schilling of the Detective Bureau said yesterday that the eight detectives would remain on the case indefinitely.