One of the characters in Petromus's Satyrica is Agamemnon, a teacher of rhetoric. In the passage below, he gives his view of the problems teachers face in meeting parents' expectations and in holding the attention of their students:

It's no wonder that teachers go astray with these exercises they're forced to rave, because everybody else has gone crazy Unless they said what the darling pupils wanted to hear, they'd be "standing in empty classrooms" as Cicero says the teacher of oratory is like a fisherman if he didn't put on his hook something he knew the little fishies would like, he'd wait on his jutting rock with no hope of profit

So what are we going to do We should be blaming the parents because they won't let us offer a strict curriculum They do the same thing with their children...