I Beg People Not To Accept The

Good Teachers Don't Approach A Child Of This Age With Overzealousness Or With Destructive Conscientiousness. They're Not Drill-masters In The Military Or Floor Managers In A Production System. They Are Specialists In Opening Small Packages. They Give The String A Tug But Do It Carefully. They Don't Yet Know What's In The Box. They Don't Know If It's Breakable.

Like Grain In A Time Of Famine, The Immense Resources Which The Nation Does In Fact Possess Go Not To The Child In The Greatest Need But To The Children Of The Highest Bidder-the Child Of Parents Who, More Frequently Than Not, Have Also Enjoyed The Same Abundance When They Were Schoolchildren.

So Long As These Kinds Of Inequalities Persist, All Of Us Who Are Given Expensive Educations Have To Live With The Knowledge That Our Victories Are Contaminated Because The Game Has Been Rigged To Our Advantage.

Well, Teachers Have Been Profoundly Demoralized In Recent Years And Are Often Treated With Contempt By Politicians. There's A Great Deal Of Reckless Rhetoric In Washington About The Mediocrity Of The Teaching Profession - And I Don't Find That To Be True At All.

When I Was Teaching In The 1960s In Boston, There Was A Great Deal Of Hope In The Air. Martin Luther King Jr. Was Alive, Malcolm X Was Alive; Great, Great Leaders Were Emerging From The Southern Freedom Movement.