A teacher who had specialized in Latin, taught, within a few years, algebra, English, civics, German and Spanish as well as his preferred subject. One woman, trained as an instructor in the domestic arts, was assigned a hash of household arithmetic, calisthenics, music and story telling. This is the lot of the great majority of high school teachers. We are doomed to be intellectually unskilled laborers, masters of nothing.
CHAPTER LXXX
TEACHERS’ TERROR
I have given in “The Goose-step” a list of some of the offenses for which college professors have lost their jobs. I might do the same thing for school teachers, and include everything, from refusing to “pass” the son of a school board member to refusing to become the mistress of a superintendent. The main trouble is that you would not believe the stories without the teachers’ names, and these can so seldom be given. Even when the teacher has quit the profession, her terror still hangs on; one writes me that her husband will not let her talk, and others must protect their relatives who are teachers. I have a letter from one young lady, who tells me that she has quit teaching and is earning a good living as a newspaper writer; but she adds: “On second thought, I am afraid after all I shall have to ask you not to use my name. I despise being a ‘rabbit,’ but my father is a professor in the state university. It would be too bad if he should have to suffer for my opinions.”
This young lady goes on to express her conclusion as to the teaching profession. I quote one paragraph:
What drives the teachers in this state to marriage, suicide, or stenography is not the tyranny of wealth—of which they are so unconscious that even I am not sure whether it exists—but the petty tyranny of public opinion and of tin-horn superintendents who rejoice in showing off their power. Where a teacher knows that she cannot dance or bob her hair or walk about the town alone at night without getting a severe reprimand, and where she knows that it is as much as her job is worth to receive a call from one of her boy students, even although it be to hear him confess his personal problems, she is not going to be much tempted to any wild flights of intellectual speculation. Being spied on by the thousand eyes of a village soon dries up the springs of adventure before they reach the surface.
Mr. David H. Pierce also has something to say on this subject. He points out that in this respect teaching differs from all other professions; neither lawyers nor doctors nor engineers permit their superiors to exercise control over their social life, and forbid them to dance or play an occasional game of bridge; neither are they kept in such subservience that they regard themselves as bold progressives[progressives] when they utter harmless platitudes. Says Mr. Pierce:
I have known teachers to be dismissed for combating shady athletics. Others have been forced out because they expected children of influential parents to do a little work for their credits. In the course of five years, I have been warned, officially or otherwise, to refrain from discussing organized labor, the Negro problem, evolution, the miners’ strike, dancing, card-playing, the controversy between the chiropractors and the allopaths, and government control of railroads.
And Mr. Burt Adams Tower, who fled all the way to Hawaii to escape from the school gang, adds a new and unique one to this list: “A few months before leaving Butte I was called on the carpet for receiving a letter on your stationery!” Said a teacher at the 1923 convention of the Northeastern Ohio Teachers’ Association: “The situation today is that if you don’t accept and apologize for every institution, good, bad and indifferent, you immediately become suspect.”
There are two very funny stories which I got from friends of the teachers, and which I am permitted to tell—provided I suppress, not merely the names of the teachers and the school, but of the city in which the incident took place! These stories have to do with Bolshevik hunts, and the hero of the first is a high school boy. He is the son of intellectual parents, but is a mediocre pupil, being obviously bored by school work. He is required to write a theme, and comes to his teacher and tells her that he cannot get warmed up to such subjects as “Beowulf” and “The Rape of the Lock,” and wonders if she won’t let him write on something real. She asks what he would choose; and imagine her bewilderment—he would like to write on Bolshevism!
The teacher probes the boy’s mind, and finds that he knows of Bolshevism as something wicked; he would like to expose those who are trying to spread such wickedness in America. The teacher refuses consent, but the boy comes back and begs again. The teacher points out to him the seriousness of such a subject, and the dangers of it; he promises to be very serious and very careful, and gets the consent of his parents; so finally the teacher relents, and the boy falls to work. He is interested for the first time, and brings in a theme which shows real study; the teacher demands more, so the boy scours the city for original data. In the end, he presents an excellent paper attacking Bolshevism; from a pupil with a low record on “Beowulf” and “The Rape of the Lock,” he suddenly shines as the “A” pupil of his class.