Hartley Neita, ContributorMy father was a Teacher. Please note the capital "T".
He felt equal to the Doctor, the Engineer, the Dentist, the Lawyer, the Surveyor and all other professionals.
He knew he was more important than politicians, and regarded those teachers like Clifford Campbell, Percy Broderick, Edwin Allen, Tacius Golding and Howard Cooke, who had abandoned the schoolroom for politics, as traitors to the noble profession which had been spawned by Mico College - even though he admired their success in their new field.
Like the many other teachers who remained in the schoolroom he was more than a teacher. He was the village lawyer. He was mediator of disputes in the community. He wrote wills for the men of the village. He wrote letters for men whose women went to America to do household work so that she could help to build a family home on her return. He also wrote letters for spouses whose men folk had gone to Panama to build the canal. They all came to him in the evenings after school to ask him to read the replies they received.
He was also the reporter for The Daily Gleaner, Jamaica Standard and Jamaica Times newspapers. His was the by-line, "From Our Correspondent" which told the story of village weddings, deaths and funerals, church cantatas, mock trials, and of course, cricket matches. And like his peers in the parish, such as E.J. Whiteman, U.T. Wolfe, R.M. Lewin and the many other Mico men of his time, he was also the cricket umpire or scorer, a lay preacher, the secretary of the Literary and Debating Society, the 4-H Club, the Jamaica Agricultural Society Branch, and the cricket club, as were the teachers in other villages all over Jamaica.
'Teacher Boy'
To parents and children, he was just teacher. Sometimes I wonder if they knew his name, for we were known as "Teacher Boy" or "Teacher Girl". Over the years, too, when I have visited for weddings or funerals, or the annual homecoming of our Church, I am still called by my elders, now dwindling in number, as "Teacher Boy" or because I was the elder child, "Teacher Big Boy".
Teachers of those years were not celebrated nationally. They were not the honoured guests of parents at luncheons on the now annual "Teachers' Day".
But there was individual appreciation. Students who won scholarships to Secondary Schools came calling with their parents before leaving the village for the schools in Kingston, or to the Holmwood, Carron Hall or the Knockalva technical institutions in other rural areas to say thanks and so-longs. Many came with their English and American wives to see and thank their teachers years after they left the villages and went abroad, some to the Royal Air Force in England during the last World War and through farm work programmes to the United States.
Up to my father's time as a teacher, the leather strap was an important article in the curriculum of teaching. We boys felt many a strapping on our bottoms for misbehaviour, never for not knowing how to spell, or what were the latitude and longitude of Jamaica. Girls rarely misbehaved. Their only misdemeanour I can recall was coming to school late in the mornings, for which there was a gentle tap in the palm of their hands.
Clean sheet
Over the years I have asked about old friends of those school years. I have not heard of one who has since been involved in praedial larceny, breaking and entering, pick pocketing or who have had to pay the once-upon-a-time 40 shillings for what was once-upon-a-time indecent language.
I would like to think that children who have been grounded in the elementary education system and were taught to stand when visitors enter a room, to say "please" and "thanks", and "excuse me" and "may I", are those who are holding the society together today.
So when I see the taxi driver driving on the sidewalk and racing the gap between the amber and red lights at crossings, or hear him blowing his horn behind me because of his impatience, I know a teacher never strapped him.
And if he were around today, my father-teacher would have advocated the removal of horns in taxis, by law!
