The Educationist

About the Book

The educationist is the story of Elwood Lumpkin, a simple-minded youth, who rises to national prominence as an educator. It begins with him as a junior at Tuckahoe College in Northern Virginia. He has failed one of his subjects which makes him ineligible to play football. To make up his failure, he enrolls in the college’s teaching program because the courses were easy and the jobs seemingly plentiful.

Kay Hightower, Elwood’s tutor who was in education for humanitarian reasons was opposed to this. She didn’t think it proper for someone to enter the field of education just to stay eligible for football.

But he persisted, and in his senior year was recruited to teach in a suburban high school near Washington, D.C.

He discovers he doesn’t like kids and opted for administration to get away from them. To do this he goes about cultivating influential people and to his delight rises to ever—higher positions.

His tutor, who had gotten a teaching job in the same school, spent much of her time and energy trying to create an improved learning environment only to resign with a case of teacher burnout.

The story concludes with him on a national television show where he was to] he was being considered for the post of Secretary of Education. It so excites him that he hides his true feelings by launching an emotional tribute to “the child.”

About the Author

Amos Houghton is a retired teacher who has spent his entire career teaching in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. A native of Virginia, he is married and is a veteran of World War II. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Newberry College in South Carolina, and a master’s from the University of Michigan, where he received a Hopwood award in creative writing. He has often noted the critical undertones of the media’s treatment of public education. The only problem is that their treatment applies more to inner-city schools than those in the suburbs. Thus the latter have gotten off relatively easy. One reason for this is that spokesmen in the suburbs are more adept at marketing their schools than their inner-city brethren. Indeed they can almost make you believe that their suburban schools are virtually paradises of pedagoica1 perfection. But of course paradises they are not. Their problems just happen to be of a different order and harder to detect because of all the spin. The purpose of this novel is to get beyond all this and explore some of the things they don’t tell you about.