The young teacher is torn between two influences: his fiancée, a sweet-natured teacher, who nurtures his softer, touchy-feely side, and memories shown in flashback of his stern, goading father, a Marine Corps martinet. At first, the island parents are hostile, but they gradually come to appreciate his more unorthodox, caring approach. Brown's methods have not worked her students are cowed but uneducated he adopts a looser, "To Sir, With Love" approach: desks in a circle, walks on the beach and, when he realizes that his pupils cannot believe that astronauts landed on the moon, a field trip to Washington. Conroy had originally hoped to join the Peace Corps, and ended up teaching instead. Conroy to his new job "overseas" and warns him that the teaching there is "missionary work." Brown bangs her ruler and tells the pupils to "mind your manners, don't act your color." She welcomes Mr. Brown, a veteran teacher who believes in corporal punishment and what she calls "the fundamentals of refinement." Before the new teacher arrives, Mrs. Conroy is greeted at the island schoolhouse by Mrs.
Today, Daufuskie Island is a luxury resort area with swimming pools, condos and championship golf courses a rustic recreational annex to Hilton Head.Ĭrossing the river to Yamacraw by fishing boat, Mr. It is the real estate market that has changed: until the mid-1970's, only 100 or so people, descendants of slaves, lived on Daufuskie Island in a community as untouched and backward as the Appalachia that Walker Evans and James Agee documented during the Depression. It's not getting better fast: the No Child Left Behind improvements that President Bush campaigned on in 2000 were mostly left behind in the wake of Sept. Programs like Teach for America attest to the economic and social disparities that still plague communities all over the country. Not that the American public school system has improved so much in the last four decades. It is a disgrace softened by the romance of rarity. They are raised in cultural isolation and subsistence living that is now mostly found in the third world and a few New Age cults in California. Island children are blank-slate innocents, so thirsty for attention and learning that they listen, awestruck, to a recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. On Yamacraw, the fictional name of Daufuskie Island, there are no television sets, boomboxes or video games filling the educational void.
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