Hard Words

What do Americans think of their teachers? Judging by the work of U.S. authors, not much. It is sad but true, says Psychologist Don C. Charles of the University of Nebraska, that in U.S. literature "teachers appear pretty generally as stereotypes--and rather unflattering stereotypes at that": neurotic spinsters, frustrated fops and dull-witted fools. To show what he means, Don Charles has collected a few specimens for the current Educational Forum.

The literary attack on the teacher, as Psychologist Charles analyzes it, had its first flowering during the flowering of New England. William Ellery Channing, for instance, seemed to think that the essential qualities of the schoolmarm were "gray hair and spectacles." Of his own schoolmistress he recalled: "Her nose was peculiarly privileged and honored, for it bore two spectacles. The locks which strayed from her close mobcap were most evidently the growth of other times." Clucking sympathetically, Oliver Wendell Holmes struck a similar note. The teacher he described in Elsie Venner was "a poor, overtasked, nervous creature--we must not think too much of her fancies."

Spare the Rod. Over the years, the female teacher, as reported by U.S. authors, never seemed to improve. There were a few "sweet young things" in popular novels (e.g., Rose Kramer in Ruth Suckow's Kramer Girls'), but they invariably escaped their fate by marrying or becoming secretaries before it was too late. The rest were like Thomas Wolfe's teacher in Look Homeward, Angel ("a gaunt red-faced spinster, with fierce glaring eyes"), or like Sherwood Anderson's frustrated Kate Swift, "silent, cold, and stern."

The men fared no better, says Psychologist Charles. There was Washington Irving's gawky schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, "with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that [his head] looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck . . ." Tom Sawyer's bewigged schoolmaster was fussy, pedantic, strict ("his rod and his ferule were seldom idle") and frustrated ("The darling of his desires was to be a doctor, but poverty had decreed that he should be nothing higher than a village schoolmaster"). Wolfe's idea of a schoolmaster, also described in Look Homeward, Angel, was "a plump, soft, foppish young man . . . who wore always a carnation in his coat . . ."

Spare the Teacher. Once in a great while, Charles finds, a teacher did crop up as a sort of hero. Such a one was Edward Eggleston's Hoosier Schoolmaster ("He's powerful smart, is the master . . ."). But these rare exceptions* have never been enough to brighten teacher's reputation.

Psychologist Charles thinks it is high time U.S. writers changed their tune. To get them off on the right track, he offers the testimony of Historian Jacques Barzun (who does his teaching at Columbia): "[Teachers] look like any other Americans; they are no more round-shouldered than bank presidents, they play golf . . . they marry and beget children, laugh and swear and have appendicitis in a thoroughly normal way. They are far less absent-minded than waiters in restaurants."

* Others: "Professor" Friedrich Bhaer, who married one of Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women; James Whitcomb Riley's "Perfesser John Clark Ridpath, A.M., LL.D., T-Y-TY." The TYTY was a bit of Riley humor. Since schoolchildren used to spell by syllable (e.g., PURITY, p-u-r-PUR; iI; t-y-TY), the alphabet after the "perfesser's" name brought forth from Riley the old classroom response.

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