Worlds to Conquer

Is schoolteaching worth it? To lure more students into the profession, Amherst College surveyed graduates who have tackled the job since 1928. The surprisingly zestful replies are summarized in the Amherst Alumni News.

The Amherst men listed drawbacks aplenty, notably dullard school boards, low pay and low prestige. They emphasized a paradox created by crowded schools: U.S. teachers now look forward to school jobs that "will get them out of the classroom." Especially affected is the really good teacher--"a master, an expert, a torero"--who gets all the tough classes with no extra pay. Eventually, he grabs an administrative job to survive. "The whole question of improving U.S. education," said one teacher, "is tied up with this dichotomy."

Nonetheless, nearly all the Amherst-bred teachers voiced enthusiasm for their jobs. Reason: "A tremor of excitement coming from the secondary schools." With curriculums in ferment across the country, "notes of boyish idealism" were not uncommon among men in their 505. They forecast exciting opportunities in TV courses, team teaching, counseling. They urged Amherst students to enter a profession "on the way up," suggested that Amherst could thereby help "deflate the grey-flannel success myth" prevalent at "provincial" Ivy League colleges. One prep-school teacher asked: "What other job would pay me to play squash every afternoon? In what other position could I sit around evenings reading Conrad, without neglecting what I should be doing?"

"Becoming a good teacher," said a veteran New York City public-school teacher, "has more in common with the process of becoming a good boxer or a combat soldier [than with medicine]. You do not have a subdued and cooperative patient; you have a mixed bag of restless unknown quantities in one room, no two of whom will react the same way. You get your brains knocked out a few times, and you get blown up several times. If you are a born teacher and not one fabricated by the professors of pedagogy, you become a first-class veteran, able to gauge the amount of interest, potential of comprehension, degrees of hostility, success of presentation and the need for ventilation, without any conscious effort on your part. You have a mass of antennae, which will spring to the alert position at the sight of any group gathered in a room . . ."

Concluded the Alumni News: "Only a very few are thinking about getting out, yet only a few are smugly satisfied. There is, among these teachers, something of the attitude of the pioneer, of adventure rather than calculation. Many seem to have a conviction that there are worlds to conquer, and that, for the first time, there are means at hand to conquer them."

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