School Days
Teachers appear a lot in fiction and I’ve been brooding recently on how they are portrayed. As with detective fiction, we often see a good cop/bad cop approach to the pedagogue, but this is too simplistic.
Every child loves Miss Honey, while every child loathes Miss Trunchbull ( Matilda), and Roald Dahl, like Dickens, gives the clues in the names of his characters. Gradgrind ( Hard Times) is bad enough, but he is not actually the teacher, just the force behind the method of teaching that Dickens is mocking. The actual teacher has the splendid name of Mr M’choakumchild.
His résumé sums up all that Dickens believes is wrong in education: ‘He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs… Orthography, etymology, syntax and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, landsurveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers… If he had learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!’
The fictional teachers we love are all so much more than those purveyors of Facts that Dickens loathed; they are always people who care about their subject – and their pupils. But more than that, they are often subversive. This is where Miss Honey fails – she is beautiful and kind and loving, but not much of a teacher.
The two truly great teachers in fiction are great exactly because they believe in education as a ‘leading out’ of children rather than a forced ‘putting in’ – Miss Jean Brodie, and Hector of The History Boys. But, Houston, we have a problem. Both open the eyes of their pupils to a wider world than any classroom can offer. Both are convinced of their own rightness. But both are, in their separate ways, just a little dodgy in their morals. Both pick an ‘elite’ group of children to nurture and, in Hector’s case at least, his reasons for choosing have a nasty underbelly of paedophilia. And yet… and yet. The really interesting thing about the play is not so much Hector’s attitude to the children as their attitude to him.
None of them wants his overtures. They even go so far as to protect the youngest from him but they seem, in some bizarre way, to accept the moped rides as some sort of quid pro quo for what he in return offers them. To be fair, I don’t think his behaviour went any further than getting a thrill as they rode behind him. But, still, Alan Bennett seems to be saying that the (true) education they are getting from him makes everything forgivable.
Dewey Finn ( School of Rock) and Mr Keating ( Dead Poets Society) are as effective, glorious, eccentric and joyful as Hector, without the underlying paedophilia problem, and those are the teachers that I would hope to be. Because what both have, despite their unorthodox methods, is a love of their subject. Mr Keating tearing up introductions to poetry books, making the children stand on tables to view the world from a fresh angle, giving them the message that excitement and curiosity are the way to seize hold of their lives, is the man for me.
It’s interesting that all the most memorable fictional teachers are men. Women teachers (Miss Honey, Jo March from Little Women) are seen as nurturers rather than brains. Men have the fire; women the warmth. Next week, I’m going to make my students stand on tables and see where that gets me.