From the Academy

Summer Servitude

More than a hundred thousand persons in the United States are at this season entering upon involuntary servitude. They are teachers. There are more than a million teachers in America, and a large proportion of them attend summer schools at teachers’ colleges and universities. Of those who so enroll, probably the majority do so reluctantly. They enroll, or else. Or else what? Or else they are denied advancement, increases in salary, and administrative approval at their schools; and, increasingly, the educationists’ hierarchy in several states is forcing the teachers to become perpetual college-kids merely to retain their teaching-certificates. (Under the proposed new certification code of Michigan, for instance, the teacher would be kept in an unending insecurity, his tenure dependent upon his perennial return for retooling to what David Riesman calls “the patronage network of Teachers’ College, Columbia.”)

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Russell Kirk

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Summer Servitude

More than a hundred thousand persons in the United States are at this season entering upon involuntary servitude. They are teachers. There are more than a million teachers in America, and a large proportion of them attend summer schools at teachers’ colleges and universities. Of those who so enroll, probably the majority do so reluctantly. They enroll, or else. Or else what? Or else they are denied advancement, increases in salary, and administrative approval at their schools; and, increasingly, the educationists’ hierarchy in several states is forcing the teachers to become perpetual college-kids merely to retain their teaching-certificates. (Under the proposed new certification code of Michigan, for instance, the teacher would be kept in an unending insecurity, his tenure dependent upon his perennial return for retooling to what David Riesman calls “the patronage network of Teachers’ College, Columbia.”)