The Schoolroom Rebellion

“Well, the teacher at school says you are a hardened infidel,” said the grocerman, as he charged the crackers to the boy’s pa. “He says he had to turn you out to keep you from ruining the morals of the other scholars. How is that?” “It was about speaking a piece. When I asked him what I should speak, he told me to learn some speech of some great man—some lawyer or statesman—so I learned one of Col. Bob Ingersoll’s speeches. Well, you’d a died to see the teacher and school committee when I started in on Bob Ingersoll’s lecture—the one that was in the papers when he was here. You see, I thought that if a newspaper that all the pious folks take in their families could publish Ingersoll’s lecture, it wouldn’t do any harm for a little boy to speak it in school, but they made me dry up. The teacher is a Republican, and when Ingersoll was speaking around here on politics, at the time of the election, the teacher said Bob was the smartest man this country ever produced. I heard him say that in chorus when he went humming around gettin’ ‘em up nights, expecting to be superintendent of schools. He said Bob Ingersoll just took the cake, and I think it was darn mean in him to go back on Bob and me too. The school committee made the teacher stop me, and they asked me if I didn’t know any other piece to speak, and I told them I knew one of Beecher’s, and they let me go ahead, but it was one of Beecher’s new ones, where he said he don’t believe in hell, and before I got warmed up they said that was enough of that, and I had to wind up on ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ None of them didn’t kick on Mary’s lamb, and I went through it and they let me go home. That’s about the safest thing a boy can speak in school now days; either ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ or ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ That’s about up to the average intellect of the committee, but if a boy tries to branch out as a statesman they choke him off.”