"Each class is a little worse than the one before; in about five
years, they'll be making H-bombs in the lab," Prestonby said. In the
last week, a dozen pupils had been seriously cut or blackjacked in
hall and locker-room fights. "Nice citizens of the future; nice future
to look forward to growing old in."

"We won't," Yetsko comforted him. "We can't be lucky all the time; in
about a year, they'll find both of us stuffed into a broom closet,
when they start looking around to see what's making all the stink."

* * * * *

Prestonby took the thick-barreled gas pistol from the shelf under the
lectern and shoved it into his hip pocket; Yetsko picked up a
two-and-a-half foot length of rubber hose and tucked it under his left
arm. Together, they went back through the wings and out into the
hallway that led to the office. So a Twenty-second Century high school
was a place where a teacher carried a pistol and a tear-gas projector
and a sleep-gas gun, and had a bodyguard, and still walked in danger
of his life from armed 'teen-age hooligans. It was meaningless to ask
whose fault it was. There had been the World Wars, and the cold-war
interbellum periods--rising birth rates, huge demands on the public
treasury for armaments, with the public taxed to the saturation point,
and no money left for the schools. There had been fantastic
"Progressive" education experiments--even in the 'Fifties of the
Twentieth Century, in the big cities, children were being pushed
through grade school without having learned to read. And when there
had been money available for education, school boards had insisted on
spending it for audio-visual equipment, recordings, films, anything
but textbooks. And there had been that lunatic theory that children
should be taught to read by recognizing whole words instead of
learning the alphabet. And more and more illiterates had been shoved
out of the schools, into a world where radio and television and moving
pictures were supplanting books and newspapers, and more and more
children of illiterates had gone to school without any desire or
incentive to learn to read. And finally, the illiterates had become
Illiterates, and literacy had become Literacy.

And now, the Associated Fraternities of Literates had come to
monopolize the ability to read and write, and a few men like William
R. Lancedale, with a handful of followers like Ralph N. Prestonby,
were trying--

The gleaming cl