The War Between The Pitiful Teachers And The Splendid Kids By Stanley Kiesel

The Status Quo Solidifier, the insidious plan of scheming Mr. Foreclosure, would turn kids into Perfect Young People before they knew it…

I am approaching the back-to-school title this year with a lot of trepidation. I am the first to admit that there are certified YA Classics that I just don’t connect with (and I’ll even admit that two of them are A Wrinkle in Time and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler!). I’ve also written here about my impatience with AGGRESSIVE WACKINESS as a ploy to hold readers’ attention, and how I have to get past that with even some of my favorite authors (ME Kerr, Paul Zindel, Daniel Pinkwater: I am looking at you!). I think I have also pointed out instances of authors Being Down With The Young People having not aged well (if we share a generational cohort, you too probably had the paperback of The Pigman with the interview with Zindel in which he responds to being asked why he uses so many four-letter words in his books by saying that he finds the language of kids “particularly delicious,” a phrase that had me rolling my eyes all the way back into my head even in the 7^th grade).

Which is all a very long way of saying that while The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids may be a cult item, and that cult loudly and universally loves it… and I really, really did not.

I’ve been thinking all week about why that is. Some of it is definitely the front-loaded aggressive wackiness, satirizing the regimentation of public schools bureaucracy as a nightmare of measures, standards and acronyms… but to the point of making the first part of the book almost incoherent.

But even more than that, the tone is insufferably smug. While late in the plot it the point is spelled out for us: “Kids should be what they want to be,” the story privileges a very specific type of kid- the ones who are (literally in one case) feral. The same sympathy is not extended to the gearheads, the boob tubers and (very strangely) the bookworms who walk among them.

The Plot: The Dr. Strangelove-style plot opens with kindergartener Timmy “Skinny” Malinky befriending Ida, his school’s Black janitress, who serves as his confidant throughout grade school, advising him a dialect that can be charitably characterized as “outdated”. He’s then sent away to Scratchland, a school for children with a “disturbed element”:

At Scratchland, there were classes for everybody. Foor poor kids there was a class called Disadvantaged, and there was a class called Exceptional for kids who were exceptionally different. There was a class called Social Adjustment for kids whose IQ’s weren’t low enough for EMR (Educable Mentally Retarded) nor high enough for Enrichment. (Kids in Enrichment were disappointed to find out that it had nothing to do with getting rich, but with trips to libraries and museums.) Any kid who was noisy, rude or anchored down by low IQ got into Adjustment.  One kid from Enrichment found his way to Adjustment after trying to burn down a museum.

Skinny is sent to Orientation which he assumes means “trying to act Chinese”.

What is very strange about the Scratchland section of the book is that clearly the author is railing again the tyranny of sticking labels on children’s behavior and putting them in boxes… but the classes are described as being led by teachers who turn on a dime to whatever strange whim of curiosity strikes the classroom.

It’s a long walk to the War. There are innumerable mentions of teachers with names like Mr. Snockadocka and Mrs. Pig Nose and references to Quasimodo State Teachers College and past employment at St. Solipisis School. Leading up to the War are incidents with the colored flags that signal the students and faculty about what they should be doing (much commentary by the flamboyant male art teacher Mr. Heather), and consideration of deploying the Princeton T.T.T.D. (Testing Them to Death):

“There’s a new thematic apperception test that runs for eighteen hours and is administered qualified counselors in armored tanks.”

While Mr. Snockadocka isn’t a fan of Skinny’s Beat poetry, the real inciting incident is (led by Skinny), the release of an epic number of stinkbugs the classroom.

Mr. Snockadocka wonders if they should consider parental involvement:

“Parents? It would be a waste of time,” replied Dr. Pucker. “You’ll never pry them loose from their TV screens.”

Instead they call upon the wealthy financier who is on their board of directors, Mr. Foreclosure and his mouthpiece, Sterling Guts, who will secure Colonel Kratz, who has recently put down a Kids’ war at “Twisted Umlaut School for Unbalanced Girls at Mount Chagrin, Nebraska” (my margin-note: “STOP!!!!!!!!!”)

Since I’m at my fill for aggressive wackiness at this point, in summary: Mr. Foreclosure is revealed to by a poisonous red ant, who has been working on a project to split the peanut butter atom, creating a process called the Status Quo Solidifier, the means by which unruly Kids will be turned into well-behaved Young People.

Although the book up to this point is rife with descriptions of sticky, itchy children (Skinny is constantly gnawing at his cuticles, descriptions I could have done with less of), at this point we are introduced to Big Alice Eyesore, a girl that had been abandoned by her psychotherapist parents at a hyena sanctuary as a baby, where she has grown up more hyena than girl. Big Alice had been a student at Scratchland at some point prior, and when a teacher tries to lure her back by reading aloud from The Socio-Physiological Foundations of Educational Stability and Determinate Motivation with Application to Stenotypy, Big Alice eats her.

Only Skinny and his comrades are able to win Big Alice’s trust and win her over to their plan: a formal throwing down of the gauntlet, a Medieval-style tournament between the Kids and the teachers. On the teachers side is the Hot Lunch Program Fife and Drum Corps, versus the Food Wasters; The Substitute Teachers’ Association, Blessed Martyrs Division (run down by kids on power mowers); and the finale, Mr. Heather in the guise of the Rococo Knight facing Big Alice.

I suspect at this point the Author, a Kindergarten teacher, may be venting some grievances about his colleagues and administration.

While it is noted that “Rococo” means “overdone,” the gathered crowds are shocked when Mr. Heather apparently flounces Big Alice to death, giving victory to the teachers and the nefarious Mr. Foreclosure’s SQS.

No time is wasted transforming the Kids into bathed and combed extra-credit seekers, although Mr. Foreclosure is saving Skinny for last. While jailed, Ida appears and turns Skinny loose, filling him in on Mr. Foreclosure’s status as an actual insect.

Teachers Bambi and Jenny Dumphy are also on to Mr. Foreclosure’s secret, and suspect that he’s responsible for Big Alice’s defeat in the battle. The comatose Big Alice has been placed in a glass case at the Scratchland library, and the Dumphys build an exact wax replica of her, switch them, and nurse Big Alice (felled by a stealth bite from Mr. Foreclosure)  back to health.

The last part of the novel takes a unexpected swing into environmentalist territory, as it is revealed that Big Alice can talk to animals and learns that Mr. Foreclosure is planning to build an industrial facility on the hyena sanctuary. Big Alice and Skinny reunite, and they discover a civilization of un-solidified Kids living in the sewers:

Long before Skinny’s war, Bookworms found places underground where they could hide for days at a time, so long as they brought enough food and books.

Bookworms generally had been a source of irritation to other kids in school because they tended to be teachers’ pets.

The Bookworms have devised a system to use the sewers at pneumatic tubes, sucking books out of libraries into their underground lairs. Skinny convinces them to turn the system to sucking up teachers and banishing them to the farthest sewage treatment plants. Ida again magically appears to aid in this project. There is a last-minute crisis when some of the Bookworms turncoat, because:

“I frankly couldn’t care less about what happens to kids on the outside. Boob-tubers, that’s what they are! They deserved what they got!”

It is a strange choice to have the writer depict readers as the saboteurs.

But the rebellion is put down, and the Kids gather to watch their old teachers fly down the drain to oblivion:

“He’s my old principal at Lockjaw Avenue, Mr. Bloatum!”

(Margin-note: “We really never stop with this.”)

In the final pages, with teachers vanquished, Skinny is left to rule his adultless utopia… which we have seen how this goes. The Bookworms take their leave, too annoyed to coexist with a group of gearheads who have taken up residence at Scratchland, and wary of rumors that a group of kids at another school is trying to run a TV station.

We end on a mystic note, with Skinny and Big Alice psychically communicating between the school and the sanctuary, and receiving more mystical advice from Ida’s disembodied voice. The End, at least until the sequel.

And so, what say you, Constant Readers? As I said at the start, this book has an enthusiastic and devoted following, and I would love to hear from anyone who has read it, love it or not, and tell me about that. While I found it gratingly phony, I can also accept being labeled as a humorless, Status Quo Solidified Young Person.