The End of Instruction

By Daniel Speechly

For all their smarts, the teachers never once considered that ignorance could be wielded like a closed fist or a bamboo pole. They surely underestimated the power of righteous stupidity. 

It didn’t help that the teachers were as stubborn as they were smart. My Great Grandfather told me about their plight, for he pitied them. When he told me their story his tears flowed for the long forgotten past that he could never again visit. The telling of his story filled him with a terrible nostalgia, and the torment of his lost youth came out in tones of deepest regret.

Great Grandfather explained that the teachers were so sure of the things they knew that they forgot about the knowledge of others. They were proud of what they had learned at the teachers college and prouder still of who they had become. They were comrades, but they forgot that they were greatly outnumbered. Bound to one another through their profession, the teachers forgot their links to the rest of society, and when asked to offer up a sacrifice, they refused to denounce one of their own. The headmaster, who was said to be the prickly sort, the kind of man who punished his students with exercise and additional assignments, was summarily flogged by a mob of youth from a nearby town. 

When my Great Grandfather told me this story, he said that there is no placard at the site where the headmaster was left bruised and bloodied to whither in the dirt, and that there had been no tree planted where he crawled to die. He doesn’t even have a grave, he said. His bones were left to scatter on the arid plain, and now his life is but a fading memory of a time most have chosen to forget.

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