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thankfully reaching the age of retirement, if children in the first grade had been so wearing and exhausting in her day, and the teacher, very promptly, had replied in the negative. Twenty-five years ago, she had said, when she had taught first grade, it was expected that boys and girls of five and six would behave themselves, conduct themselves respectfully toward their teachers, dress themselves in cold weather and put on their own arctics, and be interested, or at least quiet, at their desks. “Why, they could read very well at the end of the first year!” the teacher had exclaimed. “Now they can’t read even in the fifth grade. I don’t know. Are we getting more inferior children, in this mass education business, or are parents now more stupid and careless and indifferent than they used to be? I sometimes look at the parents during PTA meetings, and they always have something to say in big, loud voices, and they don’t say anything! They want the teachers to be full-time baby-sitters, child psychologists, play-leaders, chorus-trainers, nursemaids and child-adorers. Especially they want the teachers to worship their children, as if there had never been any such magnificent kids in the world before! Education? Discipline? Those are non-essentials. And vet these people have the audacity to blame the schools for their children’s delinquency. ignorance and inability to learn! At our salaries, too! Give the kids marble halls and sports, and the heck with subject matter! It isn’t our fault; it’s the parents’. People get just what they want, and deserve.”
    But teachers did not deserve the kind of children who were noisily and impudently filling the schoolrooms these days. They did not deserve children of six who were unable to do even the most elementary things for themselves. They did not deserve children who screamed and threatened at the slightest attempt to impose discipline, and who bounded and bounced in their seats, and shrieked and giggled during attempts to teach them. Why did anyone want to be a teacher? Alice thought. It isn’t the salary, which is disgracefully small. I like children; I think teaching is the noblest thing in the world, and most teachers think that, too. But the parents have degraded it to the meanest occupation, and the least worthy.
    As she did very often, Alice gravely considered leaving the school system. She was well-educated; she had taken a business course in addition to her liberal arts course. She could obtain a position in an office at much more than she was receiving in the schools, various benefits, paid vacations, and in the company of intelligent adults. Why, then, did she stay? Was it a sense of duty toward these masses of young pulpy humans—overgrown, overfed, overindulged, overstuffed with vitamins, slopping with milk—and a sense of duty to the world of the future? If no one attempted to undo the mischief of stupid parents then America, in a decade or two, would be filled with soft and whining men and women ripe for any harsh dictatorship that would guide and rule them, feed and house them, at the expense of their immortal souls and the continuing existence of their free country.
    People ignorantly talked of the “few hours and long vacations” of teachers, and their “security.” It was true that Alice and the other teachers were ostensibly at liberty after three o’clock. But that was only the beginning of their real work, such as correcting papers, planning lessons, and extra study. If any teacher worked less than ten hours a day then she was a remarkable specimen; she did not exist to Alice’s knowledge. The summer holidays were either a period of prostrated attempts to rest, or of working in other employment to make up for the meager salaries, or of studying in institutions in order to become better teachers. Teachers were often criticized for wanness and drabness. “Do they expect us to be glamour girls after tussling with their children for hours?”