Education has long been encouraged as the ticket to prosperity and the way to enter a profession that would assure your status in society. My grandfather said very little about education in his thesis about social class and mobility, however.

While the main determinant of social status is wealth, there are arguments that education results in higher incomes, which lead to higher status. If you divide society into the haves and the have-nots, and you divide it again into the educated and the uneducated, the question to consider is the extent to which the educated have-nots have status or not. If an educated person without wealth could have status, then he could live with respect and dignity and be treated as a gentleman, or as a lady for women. Otherwise, he must use his education to acquire wealth before he could have a more elevated status in society.

This issue would become a learning experience for me when I graduated from college years ago and got a job as a teacher in Brandon Hall School in Dunwoody, a suburb or Atlanta. I had an old Ford, a few personal possessions, and a good education when I arrived in the summer of 1988 to teach Latin at this private school for children with learning disabilities. There was a boarding house at the school for live-in teachers, which helped when coping with the pay scale, barely above minimum wage at the time. At the young age of twenty-two, I was green but eager to begin my teaching career.

A mentor was assigned to me, to help me get started. The task was simple because students were taught individually to help them with their learning disabilities, and I had only two students. My tutor showed me around the school and introduced me to other teachers. He told me he was the first member of his family with a college degree. There were several teachers who were friendly and welcoming. One of the first things they told me, one by one, was that the turnover among teachers at this school was almost a hundred percent. While I knew what this meant, each one explained that many teachers were fired every year by not being offered a new contract, while most of the other teachers chose not to renew their contracts when they came due. While there were some teachers who had been there for several years, more than half of the teachers were new every year.

My mentor also took me out to show me Atlanta and, particularly, how laid-back the atmosphere was in the city. He took me to a shop, on what I believe was one of several streets named "Peachtree," where there was an extensive selection of nothing but paraphernalia, which I thought was an odd place to take me to. He bumped into another teacher while we were there. I was introduced to this former teacher from Brandon Hall School, and the two teachers talked about the severe working conditions and the high turnover at the school. As we left, the former teacher wished me luck and told me that I would not last long there.

Over the next two weeks, my mentor gave me a lot of encouragement and support. I became one of four teachers who got along well. We were two Latin teachers and two Maths teachers. The other teachers kept to themselves and would not talk to me. I assumed that this was because I was the youngest and newest teacher, placing me at the lowest possible rank in the group. After about two weeks, my mentor left suddenly without completing his contract, after a dispute with the administration over pay. By the time this happened, I already knew that there were irregularities. I had received my first communication from the administration: though the offices of the administration were about fifty feet from the teachers' common room, the communication was sent to me by Certified Mail via the United States Post Office. When I asked a Maths teacher about this, he said: "That's just the way they do things here."

Half way through the summer, I tested my students. They both did much more poorly in the exam than they had during the classes. I brought this to the attention of the administration: I asked Mrs. Spigener what I could do about this. She had a Master's Degree in Psychology and was the top administratrix. I would find out during the following two weeks. My classes were audited by a member of the administration every day. After seven audits, this was clearly looking like a form of intimidation, like the Certified letters I was receiving. I went to speak to another member of the administration: when I asked Mr. Stockhammer for help, he told me that everything would "work out for the best in the end," and walked away. After the ninth audit, I went to the President. I told Mr. Kimbrell that my classes had been audited nine times and that I needed it to stop because my students were complaining about it. He told me that I was obviously being harassed, as he put it, but that he would talk to Mrs. Spigener about it. The audits stopped.

Getting no help from the administration, I asked one of the Maths teachers for his opinion. He said that was just the way it was. The students were at this school because they were underachievers. When I asked him why we were teaching Latin to children who could not spell their own names, he simply said that this was what we were being paid to do. I would later learn the expression that you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot force it to drink. Similarly, you can teach all day long, but you cannot force your students to learn. Someone could take advantage of this by setting up a business that extracted enormous fees from overachieving parents while promising to transform their underachieving children into college-bound superstars.

Everybody was being watched all the time. One Sunday morning I was supposed to be on duty and did not know it. Another teacher came to my room and knocked on the door. I had to get dressed quickly and be with the other teachers. No problem there. However, Mr. Stockhammer, who was administrator number two, pointed out to me that I had been wearing pajamas when I answered the door, which meant that all the teachers and administrators knew. This was a small example of the intense gossip and scrutiny that took place at the school. There was so much gossip at the school that they would not need security cameras to supervise the teachers.

If you did anything that another teacher did not like, such as try to talk to another teacher, who did not want to talk to you, that teacher would report every detail to the administration, resulting in more Certified Mail in your box. Other teachers protected themselves by talking continuously about religion and how everybody needed to open their hearts to Christ. Nobody could doubt someone who was on the path to Righteousness. You learned quickly not to talk to other teachers.

I was told on the last day of school that my contract would not be renewed. I had hoped foolishly to the very end. One of the Maths teachers had also hoped foolishly. Of the four of us, there was one Maths teacher left. After packing my car, I drove to Maryland and stayed with a cousin, while looking for a job.

There was not enough time between the end of the summer and the start of the school year for me to look for a position as a teacher in another school. Brandon Hall School had, therefore, effectively ended my teaching career almost as soon as it had started. I needed a job urgently because I had no money left, and had to ask my parents for some money while I looked for another job in whatever I could get immediately.

I called the last remaining Maths teacher in our group in October of 1988, a couple of months after I had left. He said he was leaving at the end of the month. I asked whether the administration was not renewing his contract, but he replied that he was leaving anyway. He also told me that the other Maths teacher had applied for a job in the computer business, which he had experience in, but had not been hired and was still looking for a job.

The lesson was clear. Educated people without wealth were on the lowest rank in society, just like all other have-nots, and this position was reflected in the way the teachers were treated. In retrospect, the school must have known that not renewing my contract would not give me enough time to find a teaching position in another school, thereby terminating my teaching career. I would learn, many years later, that this is the way many employers do business: if some employees are hired every year with the intention of firing them, (not renewing their contracts is effectively the same as firing them), then employment can be used as a weapon to keep the remaining employees in fear and in line, supplicant, compliant, and under high levels of stress. A similar technique is to downsize, laying off some employees, followed by hiring new employees the following month. If losing your job results in financial distress, the possibility of losing your job causes distress. You cannot afford to lose your job. You cannot even afford to be between jobs, so you must keep the job you have. If losing your job results in financial ruin, you are completely compliant and submissive. Your employer owns you, as if you were working on a Georgia plantation. You feel trapped. The stress levels among the teachers at Brandon Hall School were exceptionally high in the summer of 1988. The way the teachers were treated left no doubt that we were in the lowest possible position, and the low pay scale as teachers would make it impossible to accumulate any wealth and improve our position. Whenever I think about what it would have been like for me if my contract had been renewed, I think about how lucky I was that I left when I did. Mr. Stockhammer was right when he said that everything would "work out for the best in the end."