Lately it seems that school sex scandals are in the news as much as school shootings. In both cases, our collective shock is no longer accompanied by surprise. One important difference between these two sadly familiar school epidemics is that, in most cases, the news is out on a school shooting before the bullets have stopped flying, whereas a school sex scandal can carry on for decades unreported, pushed under the rug and ignored by the school and the public alike. This silence adds special relevance to the recent acknowledgments of sexual abuse of minors on the campuses of Brearley, Choate Rosemary Hall, Phillips Academy, Emma Willard, Horace Mann, Poly Prep, Nichols, St. George's, St. Paul's, Deerfield Academy, Hackley and Yeshiva High. It not only means that young people had to suffer needlessly for years because no adult would help, but it also means that these same abuses are likely occurring right now and no one knows or is willing to talk about it. As it has become with gun violence, each revelation of a teacher's sexual misconduct feels like deja vu all over again, leaving administrators scrambling to restore a sense of safety and control, and the rest of us simply bracing for the next revelation of a crime that we know is already underway.
Over a decade ago, we began researching the uncanny prevalence of teacher-student relationships in films, resulting in the book "Filmed School: Desire, transgression and the filmic fantasy of pedagogy." At the time, our lectures and writings seemed primarily a philosophical and aesthetic undertaking. Society as a whole was largely unaware of the extent to which real-life incidents of sexual abuse were a regular part of school life. Such wrongdoing seemed more an anomaly than a norm, and limited in scope to abuses that had recently been revealed in the Catholic Church. Over the course of our work together, however, the relevance of these screen images has become more real than we could have imagined. As the number of actual victims' stories published in newspapers now vastly outnumber the 50 or so films we address, perhaps it is time to take stock of how our society's fantasies of teacher-student relationships played out in film reflect and contribute to a culture of sexual violence against children, and how our critical reflection on the images we make of teaching might help us combat this widespread social problem.
Part of the unsettling quality of the public revelations of sexual abuse over the past few years has been the fact that we are dealing with decades of missteps on the part of administrators, fellow teachers and the public at large, implicating more than just the immediate actors. In the past, when a teacher committed inappropriate sexual advances or acts upon a student, entire school communities often looked the other way and pretended there was no issue, or sent the teachers (along with letters of recommendation) to other teaching posts. Schools behaved like churches, each quietly serving as an arbiter of its own questionable moral code. Today, schools caught in the grip of scandal send apologetic emails, enlist lawyers and make promises to prevent future abuses. We feel a collective relief knowing that perpetrators, if not always punished, are at least no longer teaching at the scandalized school. Like so many administrators in decades past who simply dismissed teachers rather than addressed the problem openly, we comfort and content ourselves with the belief that the crime leaves the building with the predator, the monster, the sociopath.
If the number of these crimes were minimal, we might be able to get away with the idea that there will always be a few bad apples and that our best response is to stay aware of unusual relationships that develop in between classes. But when a problem is this common, we have to stop looking at it as an aberration within an otherwise healthy culture — or the invasion of that culture by an intruder — and instead start to inquire in what ways the potential for abuse is already an inherent part of what we do as teachers. In other words, if old institutions want to reckon with past misdeeds, they need to develop new strategies: namely, to transcend the reflexive and routine apologetic discourse offered to victims, and see the entire problem in a new light.
So far, it is hard to see that any change has occurred in the ways that schools anticipate and address this ever-growing crisis. Official data on administrators’ precautions against sex abuse are, as might be expected, scarce. Anecdotally, it is clear that while schools and teacher preparation programs alike are rattled by the scandals, little has altered in the way that we prepare teachers for the personal, emotional aspects of their profession. Catholic schools have introduced some ethics training in response to their highly public scandals; national accreditation bodies for teacher preparation programs have included “dispositional” elements in their requirements of how practicing teachers are evaluated. Still, as before, teachers only learn once they are on the job that their work often involves managing and responding to complicated interpersonal exchanges with vulnerable young people. While teachers are now told to keep their distance from students outside of work and to follow common-sense professional standards of behavior, these obvious pieces of advice do little to help teachers navigate difficult terrain, one in which their own identities are affected by students’ demands and attention.
Simply telling teachers not to communicate with students on social media is inadequate. The influence of social media is a recent phenomenon; sexual misconduct is not. Leaving the office door open when speaking to students may make flirting slightly more difficult but far from impossible. Instead of discussing door angles, let’s recognize the elephant in the room: learning depends upon the desire of the student. A popular teaching meme quotes Yeats, “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” However, the student often mistakes this igniting of desire with a love for the teacher, confusing the verb teaching with the noun teacher, the activity with the embodiment. Again, in the words of Yeats, they cannot "know the dancer from the dance." It is the responsibility of teachers to redirect their students’ attention and recognize that the love is not for them. Teachers who make grave mistakes and cause considerable damage do so not because they fail to observe institutional protocols; rather, their actions are based upon a fantasy of power: one that occurs before teaching careers begin and goes unchecked long into adult lives. Furthermore, a culture of silence often prevents teachers from talking about the affective motivations that drive their professional lives.
To make some kind of a change, we need to start talking about desire as both an integral and problematic fact of pedagogy. But how do we start a conversation that, no matter how important, threatens to implicate the very teachers who might benefit from discussing the personal hazards of teaching? As for the students — most of whom are minors — it is often legally impossible to discuss actual incidents that are fraught with the damage left in the wake of teachers’ misdeeds. While our inability to talk about desire in the classroom paralyzes us in preventing another generation of abusers from causing harm to yet another generation of students, our representations of pedagogical relationships in popular media carry that conversation on for us; these representations act as a mirror to our beliefs and desires about teaching, showing us something that deserves our attention. For one hundred years, since the release of “Vingarne” (1916) and “Anders als die Andern” (1919), cinema has brought us eroticized images of teacher-student relationships, revealing something that we know but only begin to acknowledge in the face of another school sex scandal.
“Be careful you don't fall in love,” are the first words of warning given to teenage Manuela in “Mädchen in Uniform” (1931), after she announces to her classmates that her teacher is the captivating Fräulein von Bernberg. "She's obviously in love with you," offers the Deputy Head, in “To Sir, with Love” (1967), to rookie teacher Mark Thackeray regarding his star student Barbara Dare; "You shouldn't be surprised." None of us should be surprised, because the message we receive from these films is shockingly consistent. From “The Corn Is Green” (1945) to “Term of Trial” (1962), from “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1967) to more contemporary films such as “Election” (1999), “Notes on a Scandal” (2006) and “The History Boys” (2006), we are presented with a vision of education tied inextricably to the erotic growth of the student, and at times tied tragically to the downfall of the teacher.
Historically speaking, these films present nothing new. Plato devoted one of his finest dialogues to the subject of erotic peril in education. He observed that desire is the force by which the human soul is shaped through its experiences in the world but also the force by which the soul can be turned in a tragic manner that is irretrievable. His insights shaped Western philosophy, birthing ideologies as diverse as Catholic scholasticism and German idealism, and re-emerging in the 20th century through the field of psychoanalysis. Freud re-christened the phenomenon as “transference,” or the patient’s motivational faith in the analyst’s all-knowing authority, which manifests itself in romantic fantasies. Freud also believed these fantasies could be used productively, when manipulated by the analyst for the good of the patient. His follower, Jacques Lacan, devoted an entire year of his famous seminar to the topic of transference, concluding that with respect to the fantasy, “the lure is reciprocal,” motivating student and teacher alike, but always threatening to undo the pedagogical relationship.
Clearly, we educators need to recognize the emotional underpinnings of our academic craft. As teachers, it’s high time we were better educated, better able to direct and edit our own narratives instead of reading about them in the news. In a society where abuse in schools is allowed to continue, largely because it remains unspoken, the study of films that depict teachers as all-knowing masters and students as desiring subjects is a good place to start. “We all know that Art is not truth," said Picasso; "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." Teachers need to acknowledge past actions and present feelings in order to create better futures for their students and for themselves.
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