Letter to a Teacher
Dear Miss
You won't remember me or my name. You have failed so many of us.
On the other hand I have often had thoughts about you, and the other teachers, and about that institution which you call "school" and about the boys that you fail.
You fail us right out into the fields and factories and then you forget us.
While giving a test you used a walk up and down between the rows and desks and see me in trouble and making mistakes, but you never said a word.
I have the same situation at home. No one to turn to for help for miles around. No books. No telephone.
Now here I am "in school". I came from far away to be taught. Here I don't have to deal with my mother, who promised to be quiet and then interrupted me a hundred times. My sister's little boy is not here to ask me for help with his homework Here I have silence and good light and a desk all to myself.
And ever there, a few steps away, you stand. You know all of these things. You are paid to help me.
Instead, you wast your time keeping me under guards as if I were a thief.
You know even less about men than we do. The lift serves as a good machine for ignoring the people in your building; the car, for ignoring people who travel in buses; the telephone for avoiding seeing people's faces or entering their homes.
I don't know about you, but your students who know Cicero--how many families of living men do they know intimately? How many of their kitchens have they visit? How many of their sick-have they sat with through the night? How mmany of their dead have they borne on their shoulders? How many can they trust when they are in distress?
A thousand motors roar under your windows everyday. You have no idea to whom they belong or where they are going.
But I can read the sounds of my valley for miles around. The sound of the motor in the distance in Nevio going to the station, a b'ttle late. If you like, I can tell you everything about hundreds of people, dozens of families and their relatives and personal ties.
Whenever you speak to a worker you manage to get it all wrong; your choice of words, your tone, your jokes. I can tell what a mountaineer is thinking even when he keeps silent, and I know what's on his mind even when he talks about something else.
This is the sort of culture your poets should given you. It is te culture of nine-tenths of the earth, but no one has yet managed to put it down in words or pictures or films
Be a bit humble, at least. Your culture has gaps as wide as ours. Perhaps even wider. Certainly more damaging to a teacher in the elementary schools.
At the gymnastics exam the teacher threw us a ball and said, "Play basketball". We didn't know how. The teacher looked us over with contempt: "My poor children".
He, too, is one of you. The ability to handle a conventional ritual seemed so vital to him. He told the principal that we had not been gicen any "physical education" and we should take the exams again in the autumn.
Any one of us could climb an oak tree. Once up there we could let it go with our hands and chop off a two-hundred pound branch with a hatchet. Then we could drag it through the snow to our mother's doorstep.
I heard of a gentleman ın Florence who rides upstairs in his house in a lift. But then he has bought himself an expensive gadget and pretends to row in it. You would give him an A in physical education.
