The Blackboard Jungle

This is absolutely not an inspirational story of a tough and idealistic teacher who reaches the hearts and minds of poor children who go on to fulfill their destinies as productive, law abiding adults.

It's the story of a broken system that has created the vocational school with the sole purpose of keeping society's undesirable not-quite-adults off the streets for several hours a day. There are a few ignorant people who believe in its stated mission (to teach the youth a trade with which they can earn a living) but the vast majority of teachers and students know better.

So, this is the story of a hopeful young war vet, with ink still drying on his GI Bill-funded-teaching certificate, with a pretty young wife pregnant with their first show more child, enthusiastic about his new career and his new family and his destiny, who enters this system and must learn to survive the inevitable disillusionment.

I normally would really enjoy this kind of story. It's well-written and I like this kind of gritty realism. I also always try to evaluate a book as a product of its time, but even so, I was dismayed by the pervasive sexism, both implicit and explicit. Women and girls are no more than receptacles and obstacles here. The author even spends quite a lot of time digging into the psyches of the two more prominent female characters, but they are each only caricatures - the grasping, envious, jealous, gestating wife vs the anti-wife, anti-family career woman serving as a distraction and danger to the men-folk. One character, a young and handsome teacher, spends the entire book complaining about having to teach in an all-boys school instead of his dream job teaching in an all-girls vocational school so he can f**k all the slutty juvenile delinquent students. All the other teachers, heroic main character included, regard his rants with humorous distaste, as if he were expressing a wish to plow through a buffet of greasy cheeseburgers.

If I'd been able to get past this, it would have been a 4 star read. It's an interesting story and doesn't cheat the reader at the end.

Audiobook via Audible, with a very good performance by James Patrick Cronin. show less

An excellent story of a man "trying" to teach at a vocational high school in New York City in the 1950's -- very insightful, exciting, discouraging, inspiring. And have things really changed? Some yes, but some no. Kind of sad really :(

4 ★ 💕

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Written in 1954, Evan Hunter is said to have used his own teaching experience to create the protagonist, Richard Dadier.

Rick Dadier is WW II Navy veteran who has attended college and sought his first professional job as an English teacher in North Manual Trades High School in New York City.
(1950's)
This vocational school is "full of often violent boys who have washed out of academic high schools and wound up in a dead end, urban educational cesspool called North Manual Trades High School." (from summary)
Basically, Dadier is idealistic and the boys disaffected....the drama of their interactions is intense.

This is where it began. mr. daddy-o walks into the JD school and notices signs all over the place--this way to principal, principal's office, principal's secretary,thus concluding does mr.daddy-0, By God,we believe in signs around here.
and laugh out loud funny. it was in the 50s and of course is dated, but still we are continuing to be pretty much the same kind of human mostly. And he had such a writer's eye and ear. When daddy-0 comes to face prejudice of his own in a brief awful instant, and when his pregnant wife is made to doubt him, well, its just a great, exciting novel and it was actually the first.

652. The Blackboard Jungle a novel by Evan Hunter (read 13 May 1961) The author legally adopted this name in 1952. He also used the name Ed McBain. This novel was famous at the time I read it, and I found it appropriately shocking.

Idealistický Richard Dadier, čerstvý universitní absolvent, je umístěn jako učitel na střední školu pro problematické žáky. Protože hned první den zakročí proti pokusu o znásilnění učitelky, nevytvoří si zrovna nejlepší pozici. (Založil/a: Oskar)