6. Music Lessons

It is time now for me to introduce you to the Superintendent of Public Schools, for he had much to do with shaping our several destinies.

Him I am going to call “Mr. Auburn.” That was not his name: it was the color of his ferocious beard and his heavy, menacing eyebrows which, many people said, could be aimed in different directions, independently of one another, like a terrier’s ears. He was a bachelor in his mid-forties, a massive mountain of a man, too big for his clothes, too big for the chair you offered him, and too big for his job which, he confided to Papa, he had accepted only because the gas-boom promised to transform the town into a city and he wanted to be in on the ground floor with a school program that would set a new pattern for elementary education.

Mr. Auburn, who had struck town the same year Papa had come, immediately rocked the community with his innovations. He had called a Teachers’ Meeting, for the afternoon before school opened in September. Schoolteachers, he told them, without pausing to say how lucky he felt to be facing so many bright and lovely ladies and how they were going to be just one happy family, could be roughly divided into three categories; and he proceeded at once to this tripartition as roughly as possible.

One class was composed of elderly women who hadn’t had a new thought since our old dog Tray was a pup but hoped to hang on to their jobs until eligible for a pension.Another class was made up of kittenish young things who intended to teach until they had saved enough money to buy their trousseaus. The third class, unfortunately in the minority, contained teachers of all ages who believed in education and tried to make it attractive to children.

All normal children, he said, were by nature resistant to the processes of civilization. It required more skill to educate them today, he went on, than was necessary in our grandfathers’ time; for, only a few years ago, and from then on back to The Jungle, it was standard practice to beat them and twist their tails until they learned enough Arithmetic for their own self-protection in a world of great wickedness.

Now that it was becoming unfashionable, especially in our cities, to clout our young disciples over the head with whatever weapons were at hand, our whole educational system was in need of revision. Schoolteaching now required brains and imagination, or the kiddies—bless their little hearts—would run the show.

To insure against this disaster, continued Mr. Auburn, we would have to scout for teachers who were so sincerely in earnest about education that the youngsters would be induced to believe in it too.

To achieve this, said Mr. Auburn, the has-beens and never-weres would have to be weeded out of the teaching staff, and much better wages paid to the people chosen to fill the vacancies. He himself would lay this proposal before the Board of Education. And that would be all for today.

Merely to say that this blunt speech produced a city-wide convulsion is not saying anything about it at all. But while the relatives of some of the more seriously stricken professed to be indignant, it was generally held that the new Superintendent gave promise of being really in charge of the schools, and not a timid yes-man taking orders from a self-perpetuating Board of Education composed of a half-dozen penny-pinching old fuddy-duddies.