That was the question put to me when I was teaching elementary school in my late twenties when chatting with a female graduate friend from a very well-off family who knew about my versatility in many areas, academic and athletic. I was somewhat nonplussed by the question because I didn’t see any connection whatever between being smart, i.e. intelligent/informed/versatile and being rich. She did. It seemed that the only reason that she was happy to be intelligent was because it made being rich so much easier, and that of course was the true aim of life, wasn’t it?
That question has stayed with me all my life during varying degrees of frustration. Currently I am 79 years old and have only just discovered the answer, in science of all places. Over the years I have met many people with totally ‘normal’ intelligence who have made and continue to make stacks of money, whatever the economic situation. And they have done it by providing a service or a product that people want or need and have found ways to tell other people about their service. There don’t seem to be many jokes about that particular character trait.
An Irish friend of mine from our mutual martial arts classes told me, “Len, I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to retire when I’m 35.” We were both 23. He had a very limited high school education, just scraped through six subjects at the lowest level in his School Certificate, left school at sixteen. I had ten subjects at high levels with a few distinctions, and then stayed at school to take the Advanced Level in four specialized subjects. He told me his plan, then off he went and did it.
He had nerves of steel about heights and the highest wages at the time for working class people were those paid to the men who walked across steel girders hundreds of feet in the air in the scaffolding of the new high rise buildings that were going up in London. Most of such work seemed to be done by Irish workers, since we had no Mohawk Indians available in London. My friend joined a group of Irishmen doing the work, proved himself first day by putting a tormenter in hospital with a few skillful blows of a shovel, and earned scads of money on time and overtime, which he saved.
Three years later he bought three large slum properties in Brixton, a London suburb filling up with Nigerians, Ghanaians and West Africans, and became ‘the landlord’ who personally collected rents every week accompanied by his police-trained very large, black and tan German Shepherd. His rule was simple and easy to understand, “No rent equals eviction,” and he ruthlessly enforced it. He became very rich and retired at 35, right on the button. Then he began to invest in other things.
Last I heard he was very happy putting custom built fiber glass bodies on his Jaguars so that they could go even faster. I didn’t have a car at all in England and only this man and one other friend had one. They were quite rare among my acquaintances. Here I have a sixteen year old student driving himself to my place for tutoring in honors mathematics. There the minimum age for a driver’s license was 21. I eventually had and enjoyed a fine Japanese motor bike.
I have also met very intelligent people, who did very well at school, who have deliberately used that intelligence to extract lots of money from the less intelligent, whom they call suckers. They count the dollars they amass as the score in the game wherein the very smart out-smart the less smart. And they consider this a completely OK thing to do. There are many jokes about that character trait. The whole sub-set of lawyer jokes is about ruthless status seekers and money grubbers without conscience or ethics. And that is just a sub set.
When I had to choose between a teaching career and medicine I eventually chose teaching. The logic was simple, very clear, and pretty unrealistic. Next time I won’t do that. My teen age reasoning was that doctors always lose all their professional efforts. Their patients always die. Teachers can help their students to fulfill their natural talents and have life more abundantly after they leave school. I had several very fine teachers as role models. Teachers can help their students to a fuller life, doctors at best merely slow down the advent of their eventual and inevitable death.
Please note that this occurred in England, where at that time, not now, there were only three professions that were considered able to mingle in all classes of society, doctors, teachers and the clergy. Here in America teachers are hardly even considered professionals. Every person who has been to school thinks they are experts at education. There is here a standard teacher versus student expectation that didn’t exist in England.
Teachers here take orders from a bureaucracy that certainly doesn’t take the diversity and humanity of their student body into account. With rare exceptions the school system acts as if it were a factory trying to produce identical products from very varied raw materials. And when it doesn’t work then it’s the fault of the raw materials, not the system.
Even good teachers are handicapped by having so many business oriented bosses above them who are totally ignorant of teaching and regard it as instruction. Add to that the stigma of very low starting salaries and very long hours in a pretty thankless job in a country that worships money as the main criterion of success, and you have the current education system in which American students rank near the bottom in every international scale. The schools hire very young teachers because it’s cost effective, not because they are the best teachers. Our current president, (Nov 3rd 2008) is an ignoramus.
In England at that time my family considered education as something you had to ensure a fruitful leisure time, filled with interesting hobbies. I knew several PhD’s who worked as bus drivers because the job was secure, didn’t take up much of the day, required very little mental and physical effort, didn’t go home with them, and left them free to follow their interests in foreign languages, or stamp collecting, archaeology or scuba diving or whatever.
So I became a teacher and over the years taught every grade from two through second year technical college. I taught five subjects at high school level and mathematics at college level. In my first year of teaching I remember talking to a friend who had been to the same high school. We were close enough that he could ask me how I was doing financially.
In England we never talked about how much someone earned as an important matter. Who and what kind of person they were was more important. When some teen age students asked a very young female teacher if she was a virgin nobody objected. When a student asked her how much she earned he was howled down as a bad mannered slob and the class captain apologized. Here of course it is different. Money is God.
Well my answer to him was ‘Thirty.’ That was my monthly salary in pounds. I thought in monthly terms. He said, “Well thirty thousand isn’t too bad as a starting salary.” He was in business and thought that was what I meant by ‘thirty.’ When I explained what I meant he was appalled. “How could anyone like you even think of accepting that amount of money?” My explanations of how rewarding it was to see the amazing growth in my young students didn’t make a dent. He would regard it as a personal insult, he said, to be asked to work for that money on any job whatever.
But I did save enough of my salary to be able to have electricity put into my mother’s house. Immediately the rent went up because it was now a more desirable residence.
While I and my ten year old boy students were thoroughly enjoying each other I took evening classes at London University to get some mathematics qualifications. After I had my Inter B.Sc. in Pure and Applied mathematics a local school inspector turned up unannounced during an arithmetic class and asked me what my 43 ten year olds were doing. I replied that group A was doing simultaneous equations by graphs, group B by substitution and group C by determinants.
“That’s impossible,” said he. “Go and look,” said I, thinking I might be in the presence of a reasonable human being. He refused to look. I was called later at school by someone in the Education Department who had been my zoology teacher in high school. He said that it was time I got out of the district. There was no chance of any promotion because I had offended their chief inspector. I explained the situation. He told me that the inspector, with a PhD in education could not be persuaded to teach a class as a demonstration to show young teachers what to do, and that he was probably intimidated by someone who had brought a B stream elementary class far enough along to do algebra. It was revenge for getting him outside his comfort zone.
So I applied for a mathematics post in a high school outside the area and got the job immediately. I was very sorry to leave my elementary post but dealing with prejudice as a toll gate on the path is a lesson many of us have to learn. I got to my new teaching post before the other Education Authority could do any damage. The headmaster called me in one day when I had settled down to my new job and told me that he had just received a report about me from the other Authority. It was very bad. He asked me what happened. I told him and I always remember what he said. “If this report had got here before you did there is no way you could have obtained this post. But I’m a man of the world. I know that kind of thing happens. The man in that report is certainly not here in this room. I’m dumping it as useless.” And he did.
A major part of the local report to my previous headmaster, who also ignored it, was that I wasn’t wearing a tie and that someone in a sports coat and an open necked shirt was not a good influence on young children. The fact that the school faced south, it was summer, all the windows were open, and there was no air conditioning in the building, or in any school building I ever taught in, for that matter, was of no significance, and wasn’t mentioned. He hated me on sight and wanted to use the power of his position against me.
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed my high school time teaching academically gifted scholarship boys from eleven through seventeen. Eventually I taught some Chemistry, New Testament Greek to the Plymouth Brethren students, advanced Physical Education, my second major, after chemistry, and a few other subjects like comparative religion, as well as Mathematics to the Advanced Level exam syllabus. My salary was now more than ‘thirty,’ but nothing like that of anyone in the real world. I remember one of the fifty year old teachers, a man with three degrees who could speak and write seven European and ancient languages. He said, “We can’t complain that we may not be able to afford cars and big houses. We opted out of the rat race to do something useful and good and have to be content with that.”
That was brought home to me again when I was teaching evening classes in a technical college to have a little more income. In England it was, and maybe still is, the post office that is in charge of the telephone system. I was teaching the advanced class of post office engineers to prepare them for a promotional exam that would increase their official grade.
At the end of one particularly successful session three of the men, all younger than I, came to ask me to arbitrate a disagreement. One of the men had been given a job conditional on his passing the exam, which was pretty certain to happen. The other two told me how much the salary was for the job, about twice what I was getting, and they then said, “We told him not to accept because he wasn’t offered a car with the job. What do you think?” What I said I don’t remember, but I do remember what I thought. ' I could pass that exam with honors even if I had a bad hangover, and he’s getting twice my salary and benefits that his peers thought should include a car. What the hell am I doing working late every night for a pittance compared with the money these men will get because of my teaching ability? ' At the end of the term I stopped teaching there, although invited back.
Eventually I ended up as the headmaster (principal) of a comprehensive school that contained every scholastic level of boys and girls from eleven to seventeen. At that time too I was running three correspondence courses in Modern Mathematics for students, parents and teachers. I had been asked to write the courses for Wolsey Hall of Oxford after Sputnik went up and showed how far behind the Russians we were in modern mathematics. Then I was asked to be the tutor for the courses. That was how I spent my evenings, marking and commenting on test papers sent to me.
Several of my students were PhD’s who needed to update their mathematics education. Unfortunately the original scum-ball PhD school inspector was not one of them. Still, my income was small compared with the average business man, insurance agent or doctor. “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” was still a valid question. Obviously, by any standards I was very smart, but certainly wasn’t rich and had no hope in my profession of ever being rich. My Irish friend had retired five years earlier.
Then something happened that levered me out of the teaching profession in England and I began to work in Canada at much more than three times my English salary. But as it was a teacher’s income it was still way down the scale for Canadians.
I’ll deal with this section of the career in Part 2, when I write it, and then show what happened when I went into the corporate world in America. Now I know the answer to the question, and I will tell you after the background has been established, as it may help many people who are smart like me, and much younger, but without the incomes and savings of so many others who are much more street smart or with different attitudes.
