My teachers drift in my dreams, the few who believed in my promise, who refused to accept astral grades as more than a tinsel accomplishment, who prodded me not to do well but my best, that impossible prize.

Good grades evince facility, not intelligence. Until he died, I treated a flawless report card as a means to shush my father, who mistook an appearance of excellence for the fact. If I did everything right by his lights, I could be a scoundrel in secret. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

For most teachers, A equals adequate. Fewer compare accomplishment to capacity. These were my most memorable – and annoying – for they did not flatter me. They might even lament, in comments beside my A’s, my anemic exertion. These are my dream visitants, still shaking their heads. They saw me for what I was, a lazy poser. They will never be satisfied; nor, thanks to them, will I.

Retrospect reveres my teachers, more even than artists or saints, for teachers minister to an unarguable universal need. Art and faith are nice-to-haves, sometimes essential, but every young mind needs fledging, nurturing, poking in the right direction. And the work is mostly tedious, retelling the same story. And having to read the gloppy thinking and sloppy prose of student papers? Shoot me first.

Some of America’s mental rot may be traceable to our contempt for teachers. Plumbers are better paid, because toilets must flush but if our kids don’t flash, so what! Professors until recently were accorded respect, but now they’re deplored as “woke,” as if sleeping were a credential.

In a sensible society – (ugly times give rise to Utopian fantasies) – teachers would be royalty, rewarded with remuneration and regard. So it was when book-learning was new and viewed with awe. Now we are too many, interchangeable as Lego blocks, and if one human fails, plenty can take their place. Students are processed, not prized. Predictably, our diffidence toward teachers results in disenchanted kids. How can we expect innovation or enthusiasm from teachers if they’re treated as a necessary evil?

Ours is a dispirited epoch, down in the dumps, possessed of possessions but impoverished of zeal. Everyone’s grumpy and alarmed. Joy is an exception, evidence of innocence. We elect leaders who flaunt their hate and vendettas.

I can’t help thinking better teaching would have produced less sour citizens, but who’s to know? I know that my teachers, the best of them, rescued me from the sewer of insignificance. I mattered, because we mattered, and if we mattered, so did our works – art, history, science, all the realms of mind. How exciting to be alive with so much urgent to achieve! In my parents’ eyes, I did not much matter as long as I conformed and nodded like a bobblehead. Great teachers infected me with a longing for great things. Enough would never be enough.

To repair our polity we must first repair our souls, and how that’s done I haven’t a clue. My fear is that humans have innovated ourselves into disquieting irrelevance. “Who cares?” we shrug about our institutions and leaders – a lying, cheating, inept, trigger-happy sex predator to direct our state, what’s the big deal? If we don’t have anything inspiring to aim toward, who needs freedom?

Observers sigh, with Ecclesiastes, we’ve been here before, “there’s nothing new under the sun.” I’m not convinced. Population, technology, and complexity may have herded humanity into a new state where life itself feels more onerous chore than thrilling chance. I strain for glories my teachers first disclosed. That is why they inhabit my dreams.