A SCHOOLTEACHER TALKS BACK

How community expectations shape the roles and lives of educators.

I've always deeply respected teachers, even when our political views haven't aligned. Recently, I encountered a thought-provoking article from the July 1935 edition of the H.L. Mencken magazine American Mercury, authored by an anonymous schoolteacher in a small town in the Midwest. It paints a vivid picture of the challenges faced by teachers during the infancy of government-run schools. What's more, it illustrates how certain aspects of these challenges continue to echo in the experiences of teachers today, albeit under different circumstances. I'm curious to know your thoughts on this.

A SCHOOLTEACHER TALKS BACK

By: Anonymous

American Mercury

July 1935

I’m a schoolteacher in a small town in the Middle West. I admit this rather reluctantly now because my past experience has made me all too keenly aware of the consequences of such a confession. I know that the moment I make it, you will rapidly change your opinion of me, and an invisible wall of reserve will automatically rise between us. I am no longer a human being to you, a person who sees, hears, feels, loves, hates, thinks, hopes, and fears, Instead, I become a dull, uninteresting person, a paragon of virtue, a member of the third sex, a creature apart; in short —a schoolteacher!

You immediately become suspicious, change the topic of conversation, and begin to watch your grammar.

But I insist that if I am different from other people (and perhaps I am) it is because I have been made so by the very citizens who criticize me for being different. They do not seem to realize that I am different because they themselves allow me no freedom in my personal or professional life.

When I look back, my life before I became a teacher seems perfectly normal. I was a child of middle-class parents just about like those in the small town where I now teach. While I attended college, I was no different from the other girls who later became housewives, secretaries, nurses, dietitians, businesswomen, interior decorators, or social workers. I loafed, worked, danced, dated, and talked, just like the others. When I finished school, I was thrilled to get a job. I was idealistic about my profession in those days. It was not until I became a teacher that I found that not only my work, but also my entire personal life, was to be governed by the people of my community.

I doubt if anyone who has never been a teacher realizes the precariousness of my job. I may be dismissed for almost anything: for failure to go to church, for spending too many weekends out of town, for living in an apartment, for too-strict discipline, for too-lax discipline, for not associating with the natives, for being too friendly with certain natives, for getting into debt, for spending too much money outside the community, for having too many opinions, for not playing favorites with children of school-board members, or for holding a position coveted by some home-town girl. Every one of these causes, to my own personal knowledge, has brought about the dismissal of some teachers. Only God and the school board know what is to be my fate each spring.

I have often tried to get some other kind of work, but apparently, too many people believe Henry Adams’ statement that anyone who has taught school any length of time is unfit to do anything else. I always have to give some account of the years that have elapsed since my graduation, and the prospective employer loses interest in me the minute he finds out I have taught school. “She might be school-teacherish,” he says to himself and promptly shoos me out of his office.

The first restriction that I ran into was the one regarding my living quarters. I have never been free to live where I choose as are the other members of the community. Instead, I must select my living quarters from the superintendent’s approved list (a list composed of people who are favorable to the school board’s administration) and no other. Furthermore, in this town where I now teach, no more than two high-school teachers are permitted to live in the same house, and we are forbidden to room where there are grade-school teachers. (The idea is to keep us from comparing notes.) So for seven years I have been living within the four walls assigned to me by my superintendents, and it has mattered not a whit to them that my rooms have often been cold and uncomfortable and that the houses have seldom provided suitable facilities for entertaining my guests.

Wherever I have taught, apartments have been considered unwise and have been consequently forbidden. (The average small town disapproves of the privacy of an apartment for us teachers; the feeling seems to be that, free from the watchful eye of the landlady, we might indulge in some forbidden pleasure of almost unspeakable iniquity.) If I should ignore this ban on apartments and agree to share one with several of the other teachers so that our $1085 salaries might go further, I should no doubt find myself in the predicament of three teachers whom I knew in a neighboring town. These girls, feeling that they could live more comfortably and economically in an apartment, rented one. Their housekeeping arrangements and callers immediately became the subject of local gossip, and when spring came, they were dismissed.

Not only my living quarters, but also my personal life and amusements, are mapped out for me. My dates, if any, are to be had only with the model young men on the approved list. In fact, my predecessor is reported to have lost her position here because she went out with a young fellow not exactly the idol of the community. I remember, too, an acquaintance of mine who was dismissed because she had dates with a young man in the town where she taught while she was known to be engaged to another back home. Furthermore, I dare not go out too often with a young man whom I do not expect to marry because there is a tendency among local matchmakers to consider more than five dates with the same person an engagement. Some schools, I am told, have unwritten rules that a teacher should not attend school functions with dates no matter how respectable the young men are. This applies not only to dates with young people in town but also to those with members of the faculty. Some schools forbid men and women teachers to go together. Although the teachers here have never actually been forbidden to have dates at school functions, I should never have the courage to do so because of the comments and laughter with which my entrance would be marked. I might add that, on the whole, my male colleagues are a bit luckier than I concerning their association with the opposite sex, but even they set tongues wagging on the slightest provocation. Of course if I should marry, I should no doubt lose my position immediately.

Another personal restriction I dislike is in the realm of friendships. I may not go about with certain young people in the town because they do not come from the “right families” or they have done unconventional things. I may not associate with my students (no matter how much I might be able to teach them outside of class) because such friendships are frowned upon. I am not encouraged to have close friendships with any of the teachers because we might form trouble-making cliques or we might acquire the habit of talking over school affairs in an undesirable way. For example, my present superintendent really went so far as to ask four of us to stop eating dinner together every evening.

Then there is the ban on smoking. As a teacher I should not dare smoke in public. If I care to indulge at all, it must be furtively down some country lane. (Nor are my male colleagues entirely free in this respect. One young man I know cannot smoke an after-breakfast cigarette because some high-school boys frequent the café where he eats.) Nor is the ban limited to smoking in public. It matters not a bit that the daughter of my landlady (who, by the way, is also a government employee) smokes downstairs. If I should light a cigarette here in my room as I write this, the news would be all over town in a week, and I should find myself looking for another job this spring. Many of our high-school girls smoke in restaurants. I, as a teacher, could not get away with it.

I am not arguing that I should be a better teacher if the taboo on smoking were abolished. Nor should I want to smoke at school, because I know that children in their early teens are inclined to misinterpret the things they see their elders doing. What I do resent is that I am not given the same freedom of choice the other respectable women of the town enjoy in these days when smoking is showing such a marked increase in popularity.

Naturally, drinking is likewise damned. If I sipped a cocktail, I would, in the language of the small-town gossips, “do anything” (an expression which to them signifies unlimited moral turpitude). I think I am quite right in saying that none of us teachers would condone drunkenness and that we do not, as a rule, care to drink. However, I am quite well aware that while the sipping of an occasional cocktail would not affect the average woman’s reputation, it would irreparably damage mine.

Some restraints seem even more senseless. Although the people of this community, unlike those of some small towns, do not consider it actually sinful to dance, they set a taboo upon all available dance halls and forget to invite me to their own dances. And although the prejudice against card playing is pretty well outgrown, one of my friends here does not dare invite her friends to her rooming house for a bridge party. Likewise, I may not go to Sunday movies, although the school board and many of the mothers and fathers of the community may attend with their children. I also think twice before I go to see one of Mae West’s pictures and I am pretty cagey about recommending certain adult movies like Design for Living, for example, to people outside my profession.

Apparently even the most harmless of my amusements is under the scrutiny of certain people in the community. I am not exaggerating when I say that, in two towns where I have taught, the public librarians kept in pretty close touch with my reading habits, commenting accordingly upon the tastes of “those who guide the destinies of the young.” (Woe unto me if I seek to beguile my spare time with a detective story!) I know that I, as an English teacher, cannot always afford to recommend such authors as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, and countless others, because horrified parents have been known to complain when their children were found reading their works. The head of my department recently told me that, if she put Dreiser on her outside reading lists, every minister in town would complain about it. And once I knew a teacher who was even shy about teaching Silas Marner, because she felt that it might be considered a little off-color!

The list of restrictions is long in the school where I now teach, a school of approximately a thousand students and thirty teachers. My colleagues and I are all required to eat our lunches at school, even though some of the men live within a block of the building. I am not permitted to receive telegrams, telephone calls, or special delivery letters at school. (Indeed, the story is told of a former teacher who was not given the telegram telling of her mother’s death and missed her train to the funeral in consequence.) If I should feel ill, there is no place where I might lie down for a few minutes, nor is there a rest room where I might sit down for a moment’s relaxation during my thirty minute recess at noon. I may not talk to teachers in the halls. I am required to be at school by eight in the morning and am frowned upon if I leave before four-thirty in the afternoon. However, I am frequently asked to return by five-thirty to spend the evening taking tickets at some school entertainment. I have a one-week Christmas vacation, which I must make up in June.

Nor is the matter of dress entirely within my own hands; such things as fingernail polish, make-up, and coiffures are the objects of caustic comments made by those in authority.

In the community where I work, the popular assumption is that a teacher’s life belongs to the community, so I am subject to the whims of the citizens. For example, I am expected to spend most of my weekends in town. I must attend church regularly, and I am really expected to teach a Sunday-school class in spite of the fact that I have already faced these same youngsters for forty hours during the previous week. If I had a better voice, I should also be expected to sing in the choir. Indeed, the local attitude toward church attendance is so exacting that I have recently caught myself sneaking down a back street to and from breakfast on those mornings when I did not attend church.

Religion might play another part in my life as a teacher. If I were either Catholic or Jewish, I am sure that I should have a hard time getting a job in the average Midwestern small town. I have often thought that I should prefer to join the Episcopal Church, but I am told that a similar prejudice exists against members of that church because some of the natives ignorantly associate the Episcopal church service with Catholicism.

In English classes, where the subject matter of even such harmless poems as “The Ancient Mariner” or “The Lady of the Lake” calls for frequent explanations concerning Catholicism, I find myself in danger of being misquoted and labeled Catholic; and my colleagues in the history department report similar difficulties.

I have little time of my own. I am not only expected to attend church and Sunday school as bidden, but I am supposed to take part in as many outside activities as the community sees fit to ask me to, no matter whether I have time or not. It doesn’t matter how many hours I spend outside of school coaching plays, directing a school newspaper or annual, leading young people’s groups, or training students for endless contests; if I am called upon to give a book review, judge a group of essays, or help with a local, home-talent show, I must find time for it. Nevertheless, I know that I shall always be reminded that I really have a soft job because I teach only five days a week.

I am forced to associate almost entirely with other teachers. I have reason to believe that my experience of attending small town churches without being spoken to by any member of the supposedly friendly congregation is not unique. And I hope I do not seem too cynical when I say that in my community most of the town parties to which the other teachers and I are invited are benefit affairs. Never are we invited to those intimate little parties at which people become really acquainted, and even at the large ones most of the friendly advances must be made by the teachers. We are often seated by ourselves and are seldom included in the conversation. Thus we seldom feel free in our association with outsiders.

Another matter which rankles is that of salary. In these days of depression the taxpayer feels that I am getting too much. My colleagues and I get between $1000 and $1400 a year, but the taxpayer seldom remembers to divide that sum by twelve before he compares it with his own income. If I ever dare remind him of this, he always replies that I have a longer vacation than he. Yes, but I've never known a teacher who asked for three months of forced unemployment. Personally, I find scraping and saving for vacations one of the most unpleasant things about teaching.

And while I'm on the subject of money, I might remark that no member of the community is ever more consistently solicited for charity than the teacher, nor is there any other profession, except the ministry, perhaps, where employees are expected to go on cheerfully working without any pay at all, as have vast numbers of teachers within the past few years. Not only am I supposed to contribute to the local church, but I am also expected to give to two orphanages, the Red Cross, the Tuberculosis Association, the Salvation Army, and the Community Chest. In addition to that, I am offered tickets for any number of raffles held for this and that purpose; I am invited to benefit teas and bridges; and I am asked to pay for the privilege of having countless Ladies Aid Societies embroider my name on quilts.

I am also faced with the prejudice against out-of-town and out-of-state teachers. The complaint is that I take my money out of town during vacations. A few years ago some local merchants went so far as to try to influence the school board to pass a ruling saying my colleagues and I should spend our money here where we are employed. Yet the wives and daughters of these same merchants do their shopping in cities. This community, like many others, takes an active (and unwholesome) interest in the way my friends and I spend our money. I am criticized for buying a fur coat. If I take pains in the selection of my clothes, they complain that I dress too well; but if I buy less expensive things from the limited stock of the local stores, I am criticized for looking dowdy. Automobiles owned by teachers are frowned upon here, even though the other transportation facilities are abominable. If I should take a trip to Europe, as one of my friends did, I should be regarded with suspicion. (I am at a loss to explain this logically. For some reason trips abroad never seem to be associated in the small-town mind with education, but rather with having some sort of wicked fling. Perhaps it is a suspicion of the unknown.) And for me to deposit money in the postal savings bank would be nothing short of a crime, because the local bank needs my patronage. "This attitude still persists here in spite of the fact that we lost all our savings in bank failures a few years ago.

My political relationship with my community is peculiar. I am expected to vote; yet it would be unwise for me to exert any active political influence. I have known of several small towns in this state where teachers electioneered for a losing member of the school board and were consequently dismissed by the new board. I teach in a town where there has been considerable labor trouble within the past few years. We teachers are strongly advised to keep our opinions to ourselves. In one mining town in Illinois last year, a teacher engaged actively in a union controversy and was immediately dismissed.

As a matter of fact, soon after I began teaching I concluded that to express an opinion of any kind on any subject, either in the classroom or outside, was dangerous. All the teachers to whom I have ever talked seem to feel the same way. There are, I presume, several reasons for this. In the first place, students are grossly inaccurate in repeating what their teachers have to say. Then, too, most of us can still remember reading about the Scopes trial. I find that a disbelief in the theory of evolution is not confined to Tennessee. I know from my conversation with small-town people that they hold some mighty conservative and misleading opinions. Red-baiting is popular these days, and too few ordinary citizens bother to distinguish between liberal opinion and the most radical.

Yes, not only politics, but also national policies, community issues, religion, prohibition, sex, and evolution are topics which I, as a teacher, had better leave alone. (I am also aware of the fact that I cannot afford to admit the authorship of an article like this.) In this community I should not dare applaud any phase of the policies of Soviet Russia or Fascist Italy, or suggest that Wall Street and our legal system need reforming. I should not even think it very judicious to express my unmitigated scorn for the soft thinking of some of our early American poets, because they are so revered by certain members of the community. Is it any wonder, then, that modern education is sometimes criticized for side-stepping some of the main issues of our complex civilization and thereby failing to teach life as it really is?

Well, all this makes me stop to take a look at myself. What has happened to me in the seven years I have taught school? Have I become schoolteacherish?

I look about me and see teachers who have become sour, who have become either hypocrites or prigs, who are warped through lack of contact with people outside the profession, who have lost all interest in the opposite sex (or at least hope) and have become careless in their appearance, who have grown dull and uninteresting, who have lost poise, who can be identified immediately as schoolteachers and are too often the objects of derision.

I do not want to become like that, and yet I realize that certain unpleasant things have happened to me. Vainly I retain the hope that I am still human, that I still possess a sense of humor, and that I still don’t look quite like the typical schoolteacher. Yet I'll have to admit that I don’t dress and groom myself so well as I did seven years ago. I know that the constant strain of discipline has made me nervous. I come home each evening completely exhausted by the day’s work. Seldom do I feel the urge to write. I have ceased to have vigorous opinions and ideas. My mind has grown slovenly. My vocabulary has degenerated through constant avoidance of words which high-school students wouldn’t understand. I can no longer command unstinted respect and enthusiasm from my students, as I did in my first year of teaching. I am too tired in the evening to read the great number of books which I read in my college days. If I am invited out, I now lack social poise, not only in meeting the opposite sex, but also in talking to women outside my profession. Men seldom seek my company any more, and I should no doubt cut a sad figure on the dance floor. Indeed, I have become so used to obeying the restrictions imposed upon me by my community that even when I am away on a vacation I find myself unable to let loose and have a good time. I have become more or less hypocritical. I have grown selfish and pessimistic, and above all things, I am dissatisfied with my lot. The subtle inertia which makes schoolteachers fall into a rut has overcome me, and I sign my contract each spring and stick it out for another year, rather than face the uncertainty of doing something new. Yet I am not dissatisfied because I actually want to do indiscreet and immoral things which would hurt my school, but merely because I resent being treated as a child and being told that I mustn’t do them. In other words, I'd like to be treated as an adult human being once more.

My case, I believe, is not unique. What, then, are to be the social consequences when large numbers of small-town teachers are subjected to similar restraints?

Well, one thing that happens is that many intellectually vigorous, worthwhile men and women shun the teaching profession entirely, because of the lack of freedom in personal life. These are the very people who ought to teach, if the schools are to train young people for good citizenship and fruitful living. Still others who refuse to lose their individuality go on to larger cities and school systems that place fewer restrictions on personal freedom, shunning the small towns which they could help most if it were not for these ridiculous taboos. Those who, like me, stick it out in the small towns, often fail in dealing with students. I have observed that young people do not arrive entirely by themselves at the conclusion that I, as a teacher, am not human and “wouldn’t understand.” There exists a subtle conspiracy between parents and children against me, as a teacher. If Johnny doesn’t get along well at school, it must be because his teacher is inhuman. This feeling seems to be handed down from generation to generation, and until the parents themselves help break up this prejudice, their children will always be handicapped in their relationships with us teachers. Another (and to me more serious) result of this dehumanizing process is that it robs my colleagues and me of what should be one of our most important functions—the preparation of minds which look to a rapidly changing future rather than to the past.

Yet I cannot truly interpret modern life to my students if I am forced to live as an outsider who may not be permitted to share the normal life of the community. I cannot train them for a coming social order if I am not permitted to question anything in the existing system without being classed as a radical or a dangerous public enemy. I cannot deal intelligently with the problems of a vitally changing world if I am afraid to expound any ideas less than fifty years old. I cannot win the respect of the young, whom I ought to lead, if I am to be a mere namby-pamby.

I believe, then, that citizens defeat their own ends when they force my colleagues and me to become schoolteacherish.