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and she was absolutely impatient with sloppiness. If we had blots on our papers, she would not accept the blots. She wanted everything neat.

And as I, you know, listen to my colleagues and peers in educational psychology, who talk about the frustrations and the negative consequences of holding children to standards, I am appalled. I reject their whole permissive approach, because for some peculiar perverse reason, and I guess because my mother conditioned me so early to read, I just felt that one of the most important positive things about school was the maintenance of standards, and the fact that the teachers that I remember best and fondly, you know, as teachers, were those who insisted upon standards. And I don't remember them as being mean. You know, we used to say that they were hard, etc. But I guess, when I used the term, “difficult, a difficult teacher’”-- and this, by the way, all the way through high school, at least -- I used it positively.

It's influencing my present ideas about education, and things that I've written about the neglect in education of low income youngsters, which to me is criminal. The essence of my criticism of the inferiority of the schools is that: the absence of standards, the giving up on the children; the fashionable tendency to look upon schools in? and? education as places that should require the minimum amount of effort on the part of the students, which in fact really means the minimum amount of effort on the part of the teachers.

I go back into my own experience, and think that I had absolutely no respect for an easy teacher. And, interestingly enough, I don't believe my classmates had respect for “an easy teacher,” because