http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/06/why-blame-the-teachers
is headed "Why Blame the Teachers?", and its establishing shot looks like this.
Click to enlarge.
Look at the affectionate hearts on the picket sign. Look at the sad face on the man in the black wool cap. What this image shows us is the population of an imagined past: a domain perhaps like the one that A. E. Housman imagined in "Into My Heart an Air That Kills"; a world full of love for us teachers.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
But what was it like in real life, off the page of the kind of memory that's always a poem?
By way of a start on an answer to that question, here below is a small documentary trace. The pages come from August B. Hollingshead's Elmtown's Youth: The Impact of Social Classes on Adolescents (New York: John Wiley, 1949), a sociological study based on field work conducted between May 1941 and December 1942 -- that is, right at the end of the Great Depression, just at the moment the United States entered World War II (viii).
Because of a wartime delay, Elmtown's Youth wasn't published until the beginning of the television era, when its Depression landscapes must have seemed a vista of the distant past. But it may be that Depression-era Elmtown is a society on its way again toward resembling ours in 2011: a society divided between the very rich and everybody else. As of 1941, Hollingshead's "Elmtown" (actually Peru, Indiana, a manufacturing center surrounded by farmland) was home to an American community living in an ordinary mix of poverty and prosperity. In one other respect, however, it was extraordinary: this drab little midwestern town was also home to a rentier class which was wealthy indeed. (The immensely rich Cole Porter was a Peru boy.) It was the rentiers who ran the town and its underfunded school system, and it was the rentiers who set the norms for teachers to live by.
So here's your artifact of the life that that society ordained for its teachers.
And what do you think, fellow teachers: in the hedge fund era, does this oldie from seventy years ago remind you of anything in your current lives? Is what was once extraordinary becoming ordinary for you and those who will follow you?
