I was a
_student_ now, in earnest, not merely a school-girl learning to spell
and cipher. I was going to learn out-of-the-way things, things that
had nothing to do with ordinary life--things to _know_. When I walked
home afternoons, with the great big geography book under my arm, it
seemed to me that the earth was conscious of my step. Sometimes I
carried home half the books in my desk, not because I should need
them, but because I loved to hold them; and also because I loved to be
seen carrying books. It was a badge of scholarship, and I was proud of
it. I remembered the days in Vitebsk when I used to watch my cousin
Hirshel start for school in the morning, every thread of his student's
uniform, every worn copybook in his satchel, glorified in my envious
eyes. And now I was myself as he: aye, greater than he; for I knew
English, and I could write poetry.

If my head was not turned at this time it was because I was so busy
from morning till night. My father did his best to make me vain and
silly. He made much of me to every chance caller, boasting of my
progress at school, and of my exalted friends, the teachers. For a
school-teacher was no ordinary mortal in his eyes; she was a superior
being, set above the common run of men by her erudition and devotion
to higher things. That a school-teacher could be shallow or petty, or
greedy for pay, was a thing that he could not have been brought to
believe, at this time. And he was right, if he could only have stuck
to it in later years, when a new-born pessimism, fathered by his
perception that in America, too, some things needed mending, threw him
to the opposite extreme of opinion, crying that nothing in the
American scheme of society or government was worth tinkering.

He surely was right in his first appraisal of the teacher. The mean
sort of teachers are not teachers at all; they are self-seekers who
take up teaching as a business, to support themselves and keep their
hands white. These same persons, did they keep store or drive a milk
wagon or wash babies for a living, would be respectable. As
trespassers on a noble profession, they are worth no more than the
books and slates and desks over which they preside; so much furniture,
to be had by the gross. They do not love their work. They contribute
nothing to the higher development of their pupils. They busy
themselves, not with research into the science of teaching, but with
organizing political demonstrations to advanc