Education: Unfamiliar Quotations

Compassionate. Unexceptionable. Sort of—resounding. And really expressive of the good teacher’s relationship to the student. So seemed the quotation that the editor of the yearbook at Kingsbury High School in Memphis picked to keynote the volume: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

By the time Memphis noted last week that the quotation came from Karl Marx, the books were all printed and distributed.

And how did Marx get into the Talon, as the yearbook is called? ” “I don’t know anything about Communism. I’m not a student of history,” explained Talon’s faculty adviser, English Teacher Martha Logan. “Ignorance and oversight,” sighed Kingsbury Principal John Crothers. “Ignorance and carelessness,” fumed School Board President W. G. Galbreath.

Happily unflustered was the culprit: Senior Jessica Moore, 17, the straight-A student editor of Talon, who had simply picked Marx’s maxim out of Bartlett’s Familiar (but not everywhere) Quotations. “If anyone other than Marx had said it,” she remarked sensibly, “there wouldn’t have been any excitement.” Then Jessica went off to accept a long-scheduled honor: a citizenship award from the Memphis branch of the D.A.R.