The Schoolteacher as Failure: A Perennial Pop Cultural Theme

With a new school year upon us it seems natural that the talk is turning again to the matter of the schools--with that talk lent an additional edge by widely circulated reports of a teacher shortage approaching crisis levels, and the possibility of a mass exodus from the teaching profession as a growing possibility in the near term, or even already in its beginnings.

Whatever one makes of the actual severity of the present situation, and the likelihood of its escalating into a collapse of the educational system, the fact remains that it has meant some renewal of attention to teachers' discontents.

Not the least of them is how little respect teachers, especially primary and secondary school teachers, get in the United States.

There is a lot to talk about here, but one aspect of the matter that has caught my eye as both meriting comment while getting little attention is how pop culture tends to portray teachers as having failed in their lives somehow. Breaking Bad's Walter White is an excellent example--the fact that he is teaching high school chemistry in itself indicative of how far the onetime Sandia Labs scientist and almost near-billionaire has fallen in the world, with his having to wash his students' cars to top off his meager teaching income likewise topping off his indignity.

Others were making the point long before that--and more explicitly--with Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's classic thriller Fail-Safe worth citing. There the political scientist Groteschele, who is haunted by the memory of his onetime surgeon father's having been forced to make his living as a butcher after his immigration to the United States, in a moment in which he has become fearful for his career, speculates about the "academic equivalent of his father's butcher-shop job" and concludes that it would be "grade-school teacher to a bunch of idiot children."

One even sees the attitude presented in rather lighter fare, with a notable example the Dan Schneider sitcom Victorious episode "Tori Tortures Teacher," in which former actor and high school drama teacher Erwin Sikowitz's students take him to a play for his tenth-year anniversary as a teacher--and the play turns out to be about a man miserable in his life because instead of realizing his dreams he has been a high school teacher for ten years, right after which Sikowitz displays fairly extreme signs of distress.

Unlike White, and (probably) even more unlike Groteschele had worse come to worst, Sikowitz tells a now anxious and guilt-ridden Tori (truthfully) that he is very happy being a teacher, that he actually loved the play and that his distress was actually caused by something else (his girlfriend breaking up with him by text during the play, which, as it is Sikowitz, left him saddened for reasons other than what would normally be expected). But all the same the idea that a teacher is "just" a teacher is there, and even in this age of supposed hypersensitivity to every social concern and alleged hand-wringing over every offense to some group or other it seems likely, and telling, that no one thought anything of putting it into a show (at least ostensibly) made for children who will be dealing with teachers every day for many years to come.

Of course, if all this depicts disrespect do I think the writers were being disrespectful? Quite frankly, no. They were simply, realistically, I think, acknowledging the disrespect society at large feels toward the profession--which, in its various manifestations (including the very material manifestation of low pay compared with other jobs in which people put similar education to use), makes it a "last resort" for far more people than acknowledge the fact in a culture which deflects any talk of the hard facts of work, its conditions and the monetary compensation without which people cannot live with smarmy talk of "Do it for the children!"-type idealism and service that they would never dare to pull on medical doctors.