ABSTRACT
The erosion of teaching authority is aggravated by the fact that teachers have limited powers of career sponsorship in a market which is not controlled by members of their profession. A career structure which places an extremely high value upon youthfulness does indeed shift the locus of authority to the young and uninitiated. The legitimacy of conning and hustling as much as is necessary to support and develop one's work and career is strongly stressed in the occupational culture passed on to students. Even without knowing the details of a student's or colleague's life, performing artists could make rueful predictions and guesses on the basis of their own personal history. Given the patterns in which mass behavior, including mass education, is presently organized, art is the one vocation that keeps a space open for the individual to realize himself in knowing himself.
