RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nas.org/articles/books_with_spines_bad_teachers

This is the first of what we hope will be a long-running series of posts on Books With Spines. Gentle reader, we invite you to suggest good books for each topic we post about—and there’s a Google form at the bottom of this post that you should click on to send us your suggestions for our first topic – good books about bad teachers (let us know by Sunday, April 10, please!). This is an experiment—if it doesn’t work out, we’ll fold our tents. But with your help, we can make this a regular feature.

The Academe blog at the Association of American University Professor’s (AAUP) website put up a post a few days ago that reproduces New York’s magazine’s listing by “28 People on the Lesbian-Culture Artifacts That Changed Their Lives.” This is an expansive list of inspirational writings, which includes some marginal members of the scene: Harriet M. Welsch from Harriet the Spy figures on the list, although Peppermint Patty failed to make the cut. More typical works include Mädchen in Uniform (1931), The Lesbian Body (1975) and Desert Hearts (1985).

It’s a narrowly identitarian list for our narrowly identitarian times, but we’re grateful to Academe for posting it since it got us thinking about making some lists of our own. These lists, after all, are the heartblood of education—the heartblood of tradition. All canons start by people saying to one another, “say, you ought to read this! It’s a really good book, and it’ll help make you the sort of person you ought to be.” New York magazine is just doing the latest variation of what we’ve been doing for a few thousand years—waving a book under somebody’s nose and saying “Give it a try!” If they can do it, so can we—by way of friendly competition, as we both do our bit to keep up the process of canon formation.

The NAS staff is going to be putting a series of book lists up on our website—but lists of a different sort. Each week we’re going to have a new list—Portraits of Bad Teachers; Important Books I Finished after Multiple Tries; Books About Imprisonment; Books Imagining the Middle Ages; Overrated Classics; and Guilty Pleasure Books. And we’re going to invite our readers—you—to make your own suggestions as well. We’ll put the combined lists together on our website, a week after we post our first suggestions. We think this will be fun, but serious fun—do-it-ourselves canon formation, you and us together, to give the AAUP and New York a run for their money as they try to form tomorrow’s canon.

We’re a bit different from Academe and New York, though, because the sort of people we at NAS want to be, and think other people should be, isn’t tightly defined around identity politics. Peter sometimes tries to be the sort of person who listens to other people on back roads, and learns about them by listening, so he reads William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways. Ashley likes to learn about griefs faded but not yet forgotten, so she reads Vera Brittain’s World War One memoir, Testament of Youth. Glenn wants to know how tenacity can keep you alive in the most daunting circumstances, so he reads William Bligh’s A Narrative Of The Mutiny On Board His Majesty’s Ship “Bounty.” Rachelle wants to know how a man can preach his faith with heart and mind, so she reads C. S. Lewis’ The Weight of Glory. David likes to know how a handful of men can bring about a revolution, so he reads Peter Hetherington’s Unvanquished: Joseph Pilsudski, Resurrected Poland, and the Struggle for Eastern Europe. The books we like to read and want others to read don’t label so easily as the books you read about at Academe—and we like to think we don’t label so easily either. The books we recommend as college common readings in our Beach Books reports have been chosen with this spirit in mind—and the books we’re going to recommend in these book lists will all also have some ambition beyond reducing their readers to the identity label of the day.

We’re going to start off with a book list on a topic that is near and dear to NAS’s heart: Bad Teachers.  What are the best books depicting bad teachers?  Here are some thoughts to get started.

The portrait of Thomas Gradgrind in Dicken’s Hard Times as the architect of a deadening just-the-facts school staffed by Mr. M’Choakumchild is deservedly the most famous in the gallery of literary mal-teachers.  But Britain seems to excel in the production of image of repulsive didacts. The Latin-epithet-spouting tedious pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labor’s Lost tells us what Shakespeare thought of some of his teachers.  Fielding gets his revenge on the fraternity of classroom oppressors in his dual depictions in Tom Jones of the rival tutors, Mr. Square the philosopher and Mr. Thwackum the divine. (Tom surprises one of them in the bedroom closet of Tom’s own girlfriend.)  In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Sparks acidly etches a teacher who inspires students to throw their lives away in the Spanish Civil War. Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man gives us Howard Kirk, a progressive sociologist of malignant temperament who crushes the one student who dissents from his dogma.

Britain is not alone in poking fun at its teachers. Maybe Aristophanes should be credited with the first and most wicked portrait of a teacher in his send-up of Socrates in The Clouds. And Voltaire, of course, gave us a portrait of a tutor so misguided as Dr. Pangloss in Candide that his name has become a byword for foolish counsel and risible rationalization.

But why is it that the first examples we can think of for bad teachers are all European? Do Americans generally regard their teachers more indulgently? We are eager to hear what examples of bad teachers in literature—domestic or foreign—that our readers can think of. We are, to be sure, interested in the best of the bad, not just the bad-enough, ordinary hacks.

What do you suggest? Let us know by Sunday, April 10.