Teacher, Thou Servant, Part 1

I.

A scene from Deadwood captures it beautifully:

A rich woman asks a question of the little girl that is her ward. The little girl smiles brightly and nods in answer. The little girl’s teacher, a young woman, stands beside her. The teacher rests her hand on the girl’s shoulder and murmurs, “Answer in words, please.”

All other context aside, what strikes me is the delicate precision of the teacher’s tone. Her message is disciplinary, but her position is deferential. Her voice conveys both the tender sternness of her duty and the requisite deference due her employer. And yet, the relationship is more than employer and employed. In educating the little girl, the teacher is taking on the rich woman’s role as mother, and she anticipates the rich woman’s envy. This is a good teacher, though, and she does indeed know her role. She is a highly-trained servant, and she emotes perfectly for the part. She speaks with enough insistence to do the job the rich woman can’t—or won’t—do. Still, she speaks softly, she says “please,” and she confines her comments to the subject of her expertise. The scene is historical fiction, but it captures a historical moment in education.

Historical moments are moments that destroy mythology. We speak of myths in different ways, it is true. Sometimes, we refer to myths with reverence, like we speak of ancestors. At other times, however, myths are no more than prejudices. It turns out that history is the force that makes myths into misconceptions. History both destroys and discredits mythology by revealing it as simply untrue. It is simply untrue, for instance, that teachers of the past were allowed greater disciplinary freedom with their pupils than today’s teachers. And yet the myth of the Age of the Wooden Paddle is still alive and well among contemporary educators. Whether we pine for the day of the ruler-across-the-knuckles or pride ourselves on having progressed beyond such a barbaric practice, we still believe that teachers used to be able to beat their students into submission.

When my dad first started teaching, parents told him, “Beat the boy if you have to.” As a parent, Dad was not above a spanking. As a teacher, however, he wondered why parents didn’t want to take care of their own beatings. Or, I suppose, why their own beatings weren’t enough to get the job done. Maybe this anecdote proves the myth of the good old days of discipline, but I don’t think so. I think what it proves, if anything, is that parents have always considered it their right to tell teachers what to do. Put thus, it may sound more familiar to contemporary teachers. The only thing worse than a parent who is not involved in their student’s education, we know, is a parent that is too involved. What is striking, however, is that it has always been this way.

The first myth that is destroyed by history is the myth of recurrence. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it is not a historical comment. To the historical consciousness, everything under the sun is new, every day. History, in other words, is time insofar as it makes a difference. The first thing we suspect, then, is anything that has always been the same. And yet history is also genealogy, and it is, indeed, the study of where we came from. Time may be what changes everything, but it may also be the only thing that changes. In any event, teachers come from somewhere, and we do not escape the place we came from.

We are from a class of highly-skilled servants and dangerous slaves.

II.

What makes us dangerous is that we specialize in certain kinds of nurturing. This is the same as to say that we specialize in certain aspects of parenting, and are, therefore, surrogate parents to our students. As surrogates, we accept carefully defined limits to our authority as parents. The purpose of these limits is to prevent the usurpation of the true parents by the teacher. Thus, teaching is a dangerous human activity because it threatens to replace ancestral relationships with economic ones. The day the first teacher taught a lesson was the day we decided we could live with this danger.

Nevertheless, living with dangers does not diminish them, and history is replete with the destruction wrought by teachers. History itself is a destruction wrought by teachers. What we have destroyed is our old myths, and what we have given you in return is everything you have.

This is true, and if you don’t believe it, maybe someday I’ll explain.

III.

As teachers, are we not public servants?

As teachers, are we not servants?

The only difference is the word “public,” and all that means is that we don’t work for a rich lady from Deadwood.