The Secret School

“Now, Ida Bidson […]. No doubt this...exam business will be inconvenient. But I’d suggest you think a little less of yourself and a little more on Miss Fletcher and her ailing mother. Besides, I’m not so sure a girl needs a high school education. Any more questions?”

School board chairman Mr. Jordan lectures Ida about worrying about her educational advancement when her teacher must leave the school. This moment sets the stage for the story’s conflict: Ida will have to sidestep the school board if she wants to complete her schooling and become a teacher. The scene also establishes Mr. Jordan as the novel’s chief antagonist.

“‘But, if I had all that money…’ ‘What would you do?’ ‘Teach in a big city. Denver, maybe. Have books. My own car. A new one. Travel round the whole world.’ ‘Come on, you’re no flapper. Nice girls don’t do that.’ ‘Then, I’m not nice,’ Ida snapped.”

Tom thinks Ida’s dream to live in a big city and enjoy the full benefits of modern life makes her sound like a flapper—in the 1920s, the emancipated, stylish young women whose overly enthusiastic enjoyment of the “good life” made them targets of older generations who tended to regard such women as “lustful degenerates.” Ida resents being told to restrain her ambitions, and she hates it when others treat her desire to see the world beyond her own valley as sordid.

“She marched past the little kids playing on the teeter-totter. Just up and down, she thought. Going nowhere. Suppose if I’m not going to graduate, I won’t be going anywhere, either.”

For Ida, a life without an education means a dim future. Even her best friend, Tom, says she’s worrying too much about it, but Ida is determined to get out of the trap she senses closing on her. Education is the key that will unlock that cage; without it, she might never escape the dull life that awaits her in an old-fashioned, farming community.