In early September 1949, few people in New York City could have looked forward to the future more eagerly than 21-year-old Joan Dunn. A graduate of The Bronx's College of Mount St. Vincent, she was beginning her career as a teacher of English, and as she walked toward the Brooklyn high school to which she had been assigned, she felt an "excitement in the air, that particular sharp-pencil, clean-copybook, brand-new-eraser crackle in the ether that made me walk a little faster."
Four years later, Joan Dunn quit teaching forever. Last week she told why, in a new book called Retreat from Learning...