TEACHING 20TH CENTURY HISTORY IS ILLEGAL: One Rebellious Teacher’s Secret Classroom Lessons

(BONUS EPISODE) In a dystopian future where teaching 20th century history is forbidden, elderly teacher Miss Hippiness risks everything to secretly tell her first-grade students about a time when people could choose their own careers, experience real danger, and die without government-assigned expiration dates.

“The Last Class” by Richard Banks (Amazing Stories, July 1962)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The last class by Richard Banks from Amazing Stories, July
nineteen sixty two. And now children, said Miss Hippiness, her
smile shooting deep wrinkles across her face like the cracks
up the scarred sides of the ancient empty skyscrapers of
New York. The twelve children in the cozy classroom came

(00:22):
to attention. It was not her words, it was the tone,
the creaking smile. And now children, said Miss Hippiness again.
Sitting down on the old fashioned straight chair, she affected,
have you all put away your atomic blocks, yes, teacher?
Came the chorus of sweet young voices, your electric jack straws,

(00:46):
your pencil ofmnastics, yes, teacher. And have you all put
the pretty little activator pills in your mouths? They nodded.
Miss Hippiness raised her head and for silence, thirty dear,
dear seconds children, she said. Sigh of pleasure suddenly smoked

(01:09):
up from the twelve young faces as the pills took effect,
and they remembered, poor little darlings to be so terribly fooled,
said Misshippiness to herself. If it was only possible for
them to remember this part of the day outside and
not to have it blacked out by the pills half

(01:30):
an hour from now, to remember this part of the
day above all other parts on into adulthood. What a
different world they would create. So we come into the nice,
nice part of our day, she said, we are going
to talk again about the twentieth century. The children fidgeted

(01:52):
in pleasure. She had turned on the sun five minutes ago,
and its beams through the window highlighted the youngness, the
eagerness of their faces turned so trustingly to her. Here
and there the sunlight flashed silver glints, for instance, on
the tiny identification disks smaller than twentieth century dimes in
their foreheads and half hidden in the hairlines where they

(02:15):
were inset in each person nowadays at birth. A small
hand shot up, yes, said Miss Hippiness. Did we talk
about the gangsters? Mary? Mary? Mary asked? Another small hand
jerked up eagerly, Yes, said Miss Hippiness. Can we talk
about wars and bombs and things? Henry six? Henry asked,

(02:38):
Miss Hippiness beamed on them, children and children, She scolded,
in fake sternness, of course we can. But we've talked
about them all so often. Is it there something else?
You'd rather hear the little hands sprouted like fast weeds.
Miss Hippiness, Miss hippy is. She was called Miss Hippiness

(03:03):
even to her face now, and she didn't dislike it.
Somewhere inside her the name had begun to give out
a pulsing warmth, like a tiny, real sun. Fifty years ago,
she would have disintegrated any child who would have dared
to call her such a name. Her eyes flickered at
the disintegrator, still standing in its corner, opposite the matter transmitter.

(03:27):
But it was a dusty, dirty old thing. She hadn't
used it in years. At home, she still had the
hair ribbon. They'd been in style briefly that year among
certain types of families the last little girl had been
wearing the day she had walked so defiantly into the disintegrator.
More frequently, the last year or so, Miss Hippiness had

(03:48):
been troubled by nightmares in which the little girl's face
peppered everything strange. She didn't remember the faces of those
other children she had forced to arch into the machine.
But then she had been much younger in those days,
so much more a part of this contemporary world. And

(04:10):
of course that was before she had begun delving so
avidly into history. Miss Hippiness had been teaching the first
grade in the same school official Learning Dome one to
eleven called Old Triple one, for almost sixty years, and
she had been a great teacher. She had never been
a really large woman, or a fat one. It was

(04:32):
just that she tended to massiveness in the one part
of her anatomy. And ten years ago she had let
the massiveness really bloom. Never again had she given in
to the pressures of fashion in a world where hips
and breasts came and went on women like hemlines of
the twentieth century. The twentieth century, Miss Hippiness let a

(04:55):
dreaminess invade her eyes. Children, she said in her fond voice.
The twentieth century has never been duplicated. It stands unique
in history. Think of the richness of that far age,
when a person could actually choose what he was going
to do in life, and where there were still hunger

(05:18):
and sickness, and wants and wars, said Little Charlie ten Charles, Yes, said,
Miss Sippiness, and accidents hurting people faster than seconds and o'clock,
and people fighting each other and cursing each other with
words we don't even know anymore, like someday, vich, cried Mary, Mary, Mary,

(05:43):
Missippiness rolled her eyes in joy. It was the son
of a bitch, dear, she said. It was a string
of tiny, real words that slitshed off the tongue like
a string of right little silver daggers. Yes, teacher, the
children chorused, squirming in wonder. And there were the gangsters,

(06:05):
those wonderful, wonderful eccentric persons, like the robin Hoods and
be Wolfs I've told you about. And yes, there were
the bombs that went bam and boom and wham and
made beautiful colors and high, gorgeous mushrooming clouds like the
pictures in the ancient book I smuggled in to show

(06:26):
you the other day. And people blown to bits, said
stan thirty Stanley in a fake grown up voice. It's
a little itsy bitsy bits, Miss Hippiness, cried the twentieth
century children. Ah, what happiness to have lived. Then, the
whole world violent and dangerous and seething and exciting, like

(06:50):
a string of story books every inch of the way
around the equator, But where you could be an individual,
your own boss. They used to call it. She couldn't
sit now. She raised her massive hips off the straight
chair and began pacing up and down the room, her
face like an ancient television screen, and the children's eyes

(07:11):
followed her like hungry puppies after a mama dog. It
was the final splurge, children of the individual man, she said.
Nowadays we have a world of people, all the same,
all dull, all safe and healthy and secure. Then it
was a world of persons, and in between every bit

(07:34):
of violence there was a cozy bit of RESTful safety.
In between every bit of anger, there was a silent
bit of cozy peace. For every tragic moment, there was
a moment of sunny happiness. Edward, people really really allowed
to die by themselves? Asked Charlie ten Charles. She stopped

(07:56):
and bent a loving glance on him. In the twentieth
century he would have been called teachers pet. He was
a deer and a dull and an angel. Oh many
many good people, she said, a catch in her voice.
It died I themselves. Imagine some were taken by old age.

(08:18):
And as we said last week, there were those wonderful sicknesses.
A person could die of one of those nobody in
the whole twentieth century had a card in the Central
Bureau which had on it the date of their death.
Think of it, children, She was wound up. Now coming

(08:38):
to the new part, she had to tell them, the
part about electronics, which had been an infant science. At
the start of the twentieth century. Matter transmitters were not known,
nor disintegrators. Robots were just on the horizon. Radio and
television came to Flower. Man was just beginning to step
off the face of the world into deep space, and

(09:01):
there were so few people on Earth that there were
open fields all over every continent, fine blowing trees everywhere,
and real live wildflowers. Man started the twentieth century in
complete privacy, she said, her vast hips quivering as she paced.

(09:21):
Then came the time, This was during the years of
the gangsters, when electronics helped Man put tiny ears in
rooms behind pictures on the walls, so private speech could
be recorded. And telephones, did I tell you what telephones were?

(09:42):
Could be tapped, as they called it, so other people
could listen in. When you had secrets to tell a friend,
And then she told them. Late in the twentieth century
came the best part of the story, the discovery that
man could wire tap other men, Eely that nobody knew
think of it, She cried. You could be telling your

(10:04):
secrets to Papa, and then later Papa would be called
into a police station and his wire tap taken out,
and everything you said was recorded on a tiny spool
inside him. Ah, said the children, relishing the shudder of
it all. It was like a prehistoric ghost story, possible,

(10:27):
but weird because it had no connection to known life,
but the human wire taps. It didn't last long, said
Miss Hippiness, making a serious comic face, which brought a
ripple of laughter to the twelve youngsters. By early in
the twenty first century, every part of the world had
passed laws so nobody ever again could be wire tapped.

(10:51):
She looked at the clock. In two minutes the pills
would wear off. Eh, enough for today, children, she announced
about the gangsters. Mary Mary, Mary asked in a petulant voice, please,
Miss Hippiness, you said enough for today. Miss Hippiness said sternly,
it's time to go home. We'll tell more stories tomorrow.

(11:15):
She said it just in time. The sun blinked out,
a bell tinkled, and the school day was over. The
children stood up and waited. All right, said Miss Hippiness
with a smile. Single file, children to the transmitter in
your right order. The children walked like children always have,

(11:37):
with spurting giggles and sudden scuffles, toward the gleaming wire
cage festooned with pretty cutouts of colorful animals and buildings
and trees. Mary Mary Mary was always the first. This year,
she stood in front of the transmitter opening, let the
electronic beam play on her forehead identification disk, then stepped

(11:58):
in hoop. She was gone, delivered to her home, delivered
to her Mama and Papa, and she wouldn't remember a
thing of the story hour. Miss Hippiness thought happily, but
maybe when she grew up, maybe when they all grew up,
things would erupt here and there from their subconscious And

(12:20):
they each stood their moment for the beam to catch
their discs, stepped in and were swept off. At last,
only Charlie ten Charles was left, and he scurried around
like teacher's pets immemorial, helping Miss Hippiness do the last
things a classroom needs to put it to rest for
the night. Miss Hippiness gave his shoulders a last motherly

(12:41):
squeeze and pushed him in front of the matter transmitter tomorrow,
she said, His young grin was like wine in her blood.
He stepped in and was swept instantly. Miss Hippiness sighed
and went back to sit on a straight chair. It
wasn't comfortable and it wasn't pretty, but it somehow fit

(13:03):
whatever had been happening inside her the last year or two.
She glanced at the faint shimmer inside the transmitter where
Charlie had been swept. He was such a darling, quiet, shy, adorable.
If they had allowed her to have a son instead
of decreeing that she a' be a childless teacher, she said,

(13:24):
But she couldn't finish the thought. It was when the
children went that she felt the growing anger and unrest
and sickness inside her. It was terrible. When the children left,
she wondered how long it had been now since she
had seen the real surface of the earth. She swept
back and forth morning and night from her sleeping room

(13:47):
to her classroom. They were a thousand miles apart, actually,
but an instant apart through the transmitter, and she had
been sweping to that old library in the south of
what had been France, to browse in the forgotten ancient
books there. But she never went outdoors. She never saw
the sky anymore. Why it must be spring, she said aloud.

(14:12):
And I've not seen a creek or a river in
how long? If she had been allowed to have a sun,
and that sun had been Charlie ten Charles, what fun
it would have been to leave school every afternoon and
be swept to seashores, to brooks, to mountain peaks, to

(14:32):
the moon, to the tiny parks that still remained occasionally
in cities. She sat on her hard straight chair, uncomfortable,
but on moving for a half hour, deep in the
reveries that so often beset her now. And then the
beeper on the matter transmitter sounded. With a puzzled frown,
she got up to press the admittance button. Little Charlie

(14:55):
materialized and came out of the wire cage. Charlie, she cried, guys,
your mama know you've come back. He didn't answer. He
went to stand in front of the straight chair, and
she followed him, sitting down and putting her hands on
his shoulders. Sharly, she said, in her fake stern voice,
you should always ask your MoMA before you. Charlie's lips

(15:20):
came open, but it wasn't Charlie's little voice which came
out Susan fifty Susan said a deep, grown up voice.
This is Holmes, one Holmes. Remember I was one of
your pupils forty years or more ago. Miss Hippiness remembered instantly.
She remembered Holmes as a child, but she knew what

(15:41):
he was now. He headed the bureau known only by
an electronic symbol too secret to name. It was said
in high circles. Miss Hippiness dropped her hands from little
Charlie's shoulders and covered her face. Things twitched and twirked
like little knives somewhere deep inside her horror. You are

(16:02):
my greatest, my very best teacher, said Holmes, one Holmes,
on the recording coming through Charlie's open lips. And I
have treasured your memory, so you know how hateful is
my task this afternoon. Miss Hippiness peeked at Charlie's face
through her fingers. His little blue eyes were blank, fastened

(16:23):
to a spot high on the classroom wall behind her.
There was no tiny bit of expression on his face.
She heard Holmes. One Holmes cough and his voice went
on official. This time all pupilness erased Susan fifty Susan.
He said, The latest recording from inside Charlie ten Charles,

(16:44):
which we have just heard, convicts you beyond reprieve. Where
you found the human wiretap information, we do not know,
but we'll find it and destroy it. It is the
order that your future disintegration date is hereby superseded instead
of disintegration two years and ten days from now. You

(17:05):
will proceed to the nearest disintegrator within the hour. Miss
Hippiness lowered her face and her old eyes began sparking.
Nobody ever knew their disintegration dates, which the computers put
on the card at birth. Nobody ever knew when they
had to march into one of those horrid machines and

(17:26):
cease living. But to learn that her own had been
set a mere two years away, and she in the
prime of life. Son of a bitch, she said, using
the twentieth century epithet that came to mind. You are convicted, Holmes.
One Holmes was saying, of spreading sedition and danger to

(17:48):
our entire world in an unthinkable way. Tampering with the
minds of our children, as if you don't tamper with children,
she shouted. And it is the order that there be
no appeal from this verdict. Mis Happiness sat straighter in
the twentieth century. No matter what, for Gangster, for statesmen,

(18:10):
for Teacher, there would have been an appeal, and even
another appeal, and perhaps another appeal. Life was still rich
and treasured in the twentieth century. So she held the
twentieth century before her angry eyes, letting it blot out
the dirty old disintegrator in its corner. How would they
learned what she was doing to the sweet children? Holmes

(18:33):
one Holmes voice changed texture, Miss Hippiness. They call you now,
he said, almost fondly. We had another name for you
years ago, almost a chuckle. It was even better than
Miss Hippiness. Don't hate little Charlie, Miss Hippiness. He is
an android. Naturally. We had him made last year after

(18:55):
the Freudists began picking up troublesome things and the dreams
of the children we've had in class. Charlie has been
our wiretap, Misshippiness. Gil Teacher's eyes clamped on Charlie ten Charles,
But then they softened. She shook her head. It made
no difference if they had allowed her to have a son.

(19:17):
We caught an affection beyond affection Holmes. One Holmes was
saying in your voice when you talked to our android.
So since he had finished his service to us, we
I decided to send him back to you, miss hippiness.
He will march into the disintegrator with you. A faint

(19:38):
click told her the recording inside Charlie had played itself out.
Charlie moved almost immediately. His eyes came down from the
high wall to her face. He grinned, and she grinned back.
Charlie ten Charles, She said, gruffly, can't you stay away
from mishippiness? What a boy you are? You should be

(20:01):
out playing, maybe in a park, maybe in a boat
or a horse, like in the twentieth century, he asked.
She almost laughed. Yes, she cried, maybe like on a
horse with a gun on your hip, and the last
so to throw at things. This sippiness got up from

(20:22):
the straight chair. It was so sweet. Why wait? She
took little Charlie's hand and they walked toward the disintegrator.
There was a dreadful moment of hesitation in front of it.
This hippiness had heard of that last dreadful moment, and
she let it rack her. Maybe this was a last
relic of the twentieth century, a last real, for sure relic.

(20:48):
Charlie's hand moved in hers, and she stooped quickly and
folding him in her arms. You know what, she cried,
There was something else in the twentieth century, Charlie. It
was kissing, kissing. He said, yes, and I'm going to
kiss you, Charles ten Charles, just like back then. He

(21:11):
grinned as her lips came at him. Uh, Miss Hippiness,
he said, there's an odd difference in the minute sounds
made by matter transmitters and disintegrators. The transmitter goes swap
no matter who steps in, but the disintegrator goes shup,

(21:32):
no matter who. Miss Hippiness stood up and took a
deep breath, holding Charlie tight in her arms, almost like
a baby. She didn't have to look. Having sent so
many naughty children into the disintegrator years ago, she knew
the way she took the last three steps shup,