Introduction
The gallant setting of the Old South during the revelry of the religious Shrove Tuesday celebration provides the background for The Innocent Schoolteacher-a masterly writing commenting upon the breakdown in today's society of familial relations and questioning the structure of the educational community.
As a well-known psychiatrist noted, "The characters portrayed may be fictitious, but the evidence of their existence in the world we live in is constantly reinforced by the patient patterns throughout the nation. Today, the percentage of the population seeking help and guidance is climbing toward the fifty percent figure."
This novel vividly portrays the change in family patterns, values, and relationships in a society where miscegenation has now been accepted with a more tolerant viewpoint. It takes three teachers from the staid, sterile setting of the schoolroom into the outside world where lesson plans, rules, and regulations do not apply. They can no longer play the role of matriarch. A new life style is enforced upon them when the steadying structure of the educational fortress is removed.
Just as the students of today are questioning the values and motivations of our educational institutions, Nancy, Elaine, and Karen find themselves unprepared for coping with the myriad of unanswered questions. They look to broadening their horizon and find themselves faced with all of the complications attendant upon accepting the challenge of our changing world.
The old adage, "Blood is thicker than water," tends to become distorted as the "blood lines" become a driving force in focusing attention on the central characters of this book. The barriers of age are also dropped when members of one family come face to face with basic drives and desires.
Even the sacred ties of shared military service are severed in this piercing commentary of man's needs overcoming the lines of communication created during the emotional crises of war and fellowship.
The Innocent Schoolteacher makes no moralistic statement about the sanctity of family life nor any comment about the state of schools and educators in America. It pinpoints the perils of the changing times we live in and notes the mores of the modern male and female as they move about the jungle of life. Rod Waleman catches the spirit of the nonconformist and crystallizes the action into a spellbinding saga that may well make readers ask, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
-The Publishers