A Religious Orgy in Tennessee Read Online Free PDF Page A

Tennessee that punishments came most swiftly, and were most barbarous. it was not Dayton but New York City that cashiered teachers for protesting against the obvious lies of the State Department.
    Yet now we are asked to believe that some mysterious and vastly important principle is at stake at Dayton—that the conviction of Professor Scopes will strike a deadly blow at enlightenment and bring down freedom to sorrow and shame. Tell it to the marines! No principle is at stake at Dayton save the principle that school teachers, like plumbers, should stick to the job that is set before them, and not go roving about the house, breaking windows, raiding the cellar, and demoralizing the children. The issue of free speech is quite irrelevant. When a pedagogue takes his oath of office, he renounces his right to free speech quite as certainly as a bishop does, or a colonel inthe army, or an editorial writer on a newspaper. He becomes a paid propagandist of certain definite doctrines and attitudes, mainly determined specifically and in advance, and every time he departs from them deliberately he deliberately swindles his employers.
    What ails Mr. Scopes, and many like him, is that they have been filled with subversive ideas by specialists in human liberty, of whom I have the honor to be one. Such specialists, confronted by the New York cases, saw a chance to make political capital out of them, and did so with great effect. I was certainly not backward in that enterprise. The liars of the State Department were fair game, and any stick is good enough to beat a dog with. Even a pedagogue, seized firmly by the legs, makes an effective shillelagh. (I have used, in my time, yet worse: a congressman, a psychiatrist, a birth controller to maul an archbishop.) Unluckily, some of the pedagogues mistook the purpose of the operation. They came out of it full of a delusion that they were apostles of liberty, of the search for knowledge, of enlightenment. They have been worrying and exasperating their employers ever since.
    I believe it must be plain that they are wrong, and that their employers, by a necessary inference, are tight. A pedagogue, properly so called—and a high-school teacher in a country town is properly so called—is surelynot a searcher for knowledge. His job in the world is simply to pass on what has been chosen and approved by his superiors. In the whole history of the world no such pedagogue has ever actually increased the sum of human knowledge. His training unfits him for it; moreover, he would not be a pedagogue if he had either the taste or the capacity for it. He is a workingman, not a thinker. When he speaks, his employers speak. What he says has behind it all the authority of the community. If he would be true to his oath he must be very careful to say nothing that is in violation of the communal mores, the communal magic, the communal notion of the good, the beautiful, and the true.
    Here, I repeat, I speak of the pedagogue, and use the word in its strict sense—that is, I speak of the fellow whose sole job is teaching. Men of great learning, men who genuinely know something, men who have augmented the store of human knowledge—such men, in their leisure, may also teach. The master may take an apprentice. But he does not seek apprentices in the hill towns of Tennessee, or even on the East Side of New York. He does not waste himself upon children whose fate it will be, when they grow up, to become Rotarians or Methodist deacons, bootleggers or moonshiners. He looks for his apprentices in the minority that has somehow escapedthat fate—that has, by some act of God, survived the dreadful ministrations of school-teachers. To this minority he may submit his doubts as well as his certainties. He may present what is dubious and of evil report along with what is official, and hence good. He may be wholly himself. Liberty of teaching begins where pedagogy ends.
    * Nonagenarian flag-waving Civil War matron