Just Plain Larnin'

(no dust jacket) [nice solid copy, very light spotting to top edge, otherwise very clean and firmly bound; gilt spine lettering a bit dulled but still easily readable in good light]. Novel taking a hard look at the workings of a small-town public school system in the fictional "Nugget City," described in a contemporary review as "an industrial town in the South dominated wholly by big tobacco interests." In one of those amazing coincidences that seem to mark the lives of one-shot novelists, the author was himself a school principal in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Go figure. According to the same review quoted above, the author "describes a school system that is mean, narrow, and dogma-ridden, the pawn of politics and wealth, and a prey to all the reactionary forces in the community. He tells how the private lives of the teachers are regimented, how they are criticized for the most trivial irregularity, how radicalism among their number is ruthlessly stamped out. He stresses the difficulties of modernizing the curriculum. More daringly, he shows that the industrial overlords of the town are opposed to any liberalizing form of instruction which might open the eyes of the workers' children and increase their discontent." Kinda makes you wonder how long Mr. Shields kept his job after the book came out, doesn't it Hanna 3199.

Product Info

Publisher: Coward-McCann, Inc

Year: 1934

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

ReadInk

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Country: United States