School is in

What films about teachers teach

By Gerald Peary

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH: Ray Walston tries to explain to Sean Penn that pizza isn’t in the curriculum.

It’s another damned September, and I’m back in school, writhing and kicking like many of you, but on the other side of the desk. I’m a teacher, the one with the chalky crumpled sports jacket, the nostalgic-for-1967 haircut and jeans, and the by-rote explanation of my get-tough grading policy. Is there any truth to the stereotype of teachers as geeky, grumpy, blind to fashion, and clinging to pre-computer era standards? Sure, I say, peeking in a mirror (though rarely) at my professor self. And what about teaching because you can’t do real work? Or because you’re too eccentric to succeed among adults? All the above are often true in my calling, and they’ve been true, and will stay so.

Whenever Frederick Wiseman shows High School (1969), his wry documentary of student-faculty life at a Philadelphia public school, people come up to him and exclaim, “That’s my high school! I had those weird teachers!” They’ve been saying that for 32 years. I’m the first to enjoy a enjoy a satiric poke at the teaching profession — we deserve it! And the movies, of course, are rife with such jibes. Who didn’t suffer public humiliation from someone like the tart-tongued Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Who didn’t encounter a smugly tenured teacher snoring in class behind a newspaper à la Royal Dano’s cadaverous pedant in Teachers (1984)? Who didn’t have a well-meaning liberal like the art teacher (Illeana Douglas) in the current Ghost World whose mushy, middlebrow vantage means that the students encouraged for art careers are never the marginal ones?

Yet when movies do the opposite, show you a teacher to emulate, someone above satire, I often balk. I’ve never admired Harvard Law professor Kingsfield (John Houseman) in The Paper Chase (1973), whose tyrannical ways supposedly get academic results. There’s no need to be such a haughty SOB. Even at Harvard. And what about the immortal Mr. Chipping (Oscar winner Robert Donat), Hollywood’s beloved teacher of generation upon generation of English preps in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)? Sorry, but he’s a servile, doddering old fool. And the worst: Robin Williams’s “seize the day” English teacher in Dead Poets Society (1989). He scampers up on his desk and begs to be loved while mocking any student who doesn’t agree with his pronouncements. He’s the faux bohemian who requires absolute conformity of opinion and worship from those in his class. The students fall in line with their leader, and the lm fascistically endorses their subservience.

What teachers in classic films get an A? The anarchist (Jean Dasté) in Zéro de conduite (1933), who does Chaplin imitations for his students and plays silly games with them on the playground but, unlike egomaniac Robin Williams, demands nothing in return for befriending them. The earnest white liberal Rick Dadier (Glenn Ford) in the ’50s classic Blackboard Jungle (1955), who struggles to get his juvenile-delinquent-heavy class to care about learning. This was the first Hollywood film to deal with classroom multiculturalism. In a startling moment for Hollywood, Dadier must confront his buried racism when he starts to attack his uncooperative African-American student, “Why you black . . . ”

Sidney Poitier’s dignified, caring, black teacher from the Caribbean who’s assigned to an East End London school in To Sir, with Love (1967). This is England, so there’s no hope that these students from the wrong side of town will ever go to Eton or work for the BBC. Nevertheless, Poitier gets them to care, and their class trip is a thing of beauty and discovery, buoyed by Lulu’s super-great theme song. As for the slow-then-fast dance at the end between Poitier and mini-skirted teenager Judy Geeson, it’s moviedom’s finest tribute to the erotic feelings that can arise between teacher and student, acknowledged wordlessly on both sides, without the possibility of ever being acted on.

And nally, Dr. Itard in The Wild Child (1970), François Truffaut’s true story of the early 19th-century home education of an illiterate, unsocialized boy found in nature. Sometimes humane, sometimes harsh and firm, Itard determines to teach the boy to read and write, wear clothes, have table manners. The film is a philosophical investigation: is Itard’s pedantry improving the boy or ruining him? Truffaut as director endorses the anti-Rousseau character he plays in the movie. The filmmaker vividly remembers his own “wild child” boyhood: he was lost on the Paris streets until he was rescued by his adopted unof cial parent (and teacher), film critic André Bazin.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.