Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
In an essay, Professor Elaine Marks writes: "As I grow older...I am convinced that desire is the central force in teaching, a force that can be dangerous if is not recognized and controlled but without which the language and literature classroom is a dry and boring place" (MLA Newsletter 25, 1993: 3-4).
If true, is such "desire" specifically "erotic"? Do many teachers and students secretly long to have sex with each other? Or is this "erotic" feeling more diffuse, mysterious, than mere sexual desire? And, though Marks mentions only language and literature courses, could there also be a hidden erotic subtext lurking in, say, your average computer or algebra class?
Such volatile but important questions open a Pandora's Box regarding the educational process. I've now reviewed two books on this topic: The Erotics of Instruction, edited by Regina Barreca and Deborah Morse (see MP's Spring 1998 issue), and, here, Jo Keroes' Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film. Both works have strengths, but both, ultimately, fall short, and for the same basic reason: a narrow focus on how "the erotics of instruction" has been dramatized in literature and film, which omits any exploration of actual classroom experiences, especially contemporary ones. While this, no doubt, timid omission is understandable, given the explosive sexual climate common on most college campuses, it tends to make for dull and shallow engagements of these issues.
Certainly, Keroes seems qualified to write authoritatively on higher education today, since she's an English professor at San Francisco State University, while also coordinating a graduate program in teacher-training. Moreover, there are several hints in the book's opening pages that Keroes' own relationships with students are very much on her mind. In the very first sentence, she boldly proclaims: "Research is always prompted by personal interest," before going on to say that "for as long as I have been an adult, I have been a teacher, [and] most of the major experiences in my life have been connected in one way or another with my life as a teacher" (ix).
And yet, as her subtitle notes, for the rest of the book Keroes discusses only how pedagogical Eros has been portrayed in fiction and film. In her acknowledgments, she seems vaguely aware of and uneasy about this exclusion, claiming that "whether or not [the] teachers and students [whom I've worked with or taught] recognize themselves, they are present in the book, not in the conventional way, as versions of the characters and situations I discuss, but as catalysts, inspirers of the book's writing, inscriptions in the text" (ix). Put in plain English, Keroes' students and colleagues are in her book even though they aren't in her book.
To be fair, Tales Out of School does discuss, in perhaps its best chapter, one nonfiction account of a teacher/student romance, though it's safely set in 12th century France--the scandalous tryst between the famous philosopher-rhetorician, Peter Abelard, and the aristocratic, adolescent girl he'd been to hired to tutor, the brilliant and beautiful Heloise. This ancient story is recounted in two sources: Abelard's Historia Calamitatum, an account of the affair written shortly after its public exposure, and a collection of letters exchanged between the two ex-lovers during the second halves of their lives, which each spent monastically confined. In Historia Calamitatum, Abelard writes, "With our lessons as a pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love," adding that "my hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages" (18-19). While Abelard's allusion to perusing Heloise's breasts, rather than whatever learned tome was on the syllabus, today sounds inadvertently comic, Keroes argues that Abelard's remark implies, consciously or not, the close connection between education and romance, the pedagogical exchange between teacher and student and the erotic one between lovers. In both instances, she claims, the pair are seeking to attain, through these comparably deep human interactions, a kind of self-transcendence, self-transformation--since both true love and true learning offer the thrilling promise of rebirth. Challenging centuries of philistine canards about the alleged sterility of the intellectual process, Keroes insists that there is nothing quite so sexy as a brilliant mind, that education is a kind of love and love a kind of education.
But the rub, Keroes claims, is that with pedagogy and Eros so intimately entwined, the eroticism latent in teacher/student relations always risks becoming manifest, as hands naturally stray from books to bosoms. Just as, according to Freud, incest is so taboo because it expresses our deepest infantile wishes, so, Keroes maintains, society has traditionally condemned and punished teacher/student romances so virulently, because of an unconscious recognition of how erotically charged the pedagogical relationship actually is.
The sorry fate of Heloise and Abelard certainly confirms her diagnosis. After Heloise became pregnant, Abelard married her, but Heloise's uncle (who'd originally hired Abelard as his niece's tutor), still fuming over the teacher's betrayal, vengefully ordered his henchmen to castrate the poor pedant. During the following years, which Abelard and Heloise spent cloistered, they engaged in an epistolary and a far chaster version of their original teacher/student relationship, as Abelard exhaustively lectured Heloise (appointed prioress of her nunnery) on the ideal organization of a convent. For his part, Abelard totally denounced his former romantic love for Heloise--even when it had been expressed within the sanctified bonds of marriage. He went so far as to see his castration as a blessing from God, since "it was wholly just and merciful...for me to be reduced in that part of my body which was the...sole reason for those desires.... Only thus could I become...fit to approach the holy altars" (29). Heloise, in contrast, remained staunchly unrepentant and still deeply in love with her former teacher. (Keroes argues persuasively that she entered the convent in the first place less from any genuine spiritual calling, than simply in order to obey her husband's wishes.) "How can it be called repentance for sins, however great the mortification of the flesh," she plaintively asks in one letter, " if the mind still retains the will to sin and is on fire with its old desires?" And in another missive she confesses, with heartbreaking honesty: "I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost" (29).
Keroes concludes that the tragedy of Heloise and Abelard "represents the essence of the teacher-student exchange"--a conclusion some readers may find unconvincing, given the bizarre and melodramatic nature of the tale (32). But if one sees Heloise and Abelard's story as an extreme and explicit version of what often occurs between teachers and students far more mildly and implicitly, then Keroes' claim makes sense.
In the rest of Tales Out of School, Keroes studies more recent and fictional portrayals of pedagogical eroticism. Best is her discussion of Hollywood films (which she wittily labels "teacher features"), including The Blackboard Jungle, Up the Down Staircase, To Sir With Love, Conrack, Little Man Tate, Educating Rita, Dead Poets' Society, and Children of a Lesser God. Many of these analyses scrutinize issues of race and gender (invariably, from a left-wing perspective), and how such issues merge on the screen with erotic subtexts, often explosively. At times, Keroes' feminist and Afrocentric explications are superb. For example, she astutely argues that Dead Poets' Society only postures as a paean to noble individualism defying repressive conventions (defiance supposedly embodied by English teacher John Keating, played with typical hyperactive bravado by Robin Williams). On the contrary, Keroes finds the film's underlying message to be entirely conformist and tradition-bound. "The figure of the solitary romantic hero fighting against society," she points out, "fulfills a culturally sanctioned role," especially when the "hero" in question is a white man preaching his rugged individualist gospel to white boys at an exclusive, all-male prep school (51). Keroes also laments that the movie "will not admit to the homoerotic subtext in which this story of a group of boys falling in love with their teacher is played out" (51).
When considering other popular films, however, Keroes often draws conclusions which are reductively PC--not so much challenging more conservative interpretations (which would be fine), as seemingly unaware that such counter arguments even exist. For example, while discussing To Sir With Love, Keroes laments that the black teacher, Mark Thackeray (Sydney Poitier), who's employed at a largely white school in a London slum, doesn't inspire his charges to rise up against the capitalist oppressors who exploit blacks and poor whites alike; instead, to Keroes' dismay, Thackeray does just the opposite--"insist[ing] on the conventional proprieties, including that adult males should be addressed as 'Sir'," while seeking to instill in his students respect for bourgeois values in general, by, e.g., having "conversations with the class about love, honesty, finding a suitable mate" (74 & 76).
While Keroes attributes Thackeray's conventionality to a ploy by the filmmakers to "neuter" his threatening black sexuality, she seems blithely unaware that any reader might find middle-class values extolling "love, honesty [and] finding a suitable mate" more appealing than her quasi-Marxist alternative. Moreover, given that Western capitalism is unlikely to crumble any time soon, it surely makes sense for poor youth, black and white, to learn mainstream etiquette and values, in order to have any hope of social and economic advancement. Finally, while Keroes sees Thackeray as traitorously abandoning his race by acting "white," one might contend that, on the contrary, there's something quite bold, even subversively Afrocentric, about a movie featuring a black man who stands before a group of whites and demands that they call him "Sir"--especially in 1967 (the year the film appeared), when the civil rights movement was insisting that whites not treat blacks as "boys".
Tales Out of School does end provocatively (though only by straying far afield from Keroes' purported topic of pedagogical Eros). In her conclusion, not only does Keroes contrast popular culture's mythified portrayal of education with the grim realities of classrooms today, but she also insists that this idealized portrait undermines meaningful educational reform by evading the very problems most desperately in need of correction. For example, pop culture repeatedly presents teachers heroically engaged in transforming the lives of individual, often impoverished students. But such depictions conveniently ignore all the gritty realities, shaped by large social, political and economic forces, that make such transformations extremely rare in contemporary classrooms, especially in poor schools--e.g., low teacher salaries, increased work-loads and class sizes, decrepit buildings and equipment, etc. Keroes speculates that many teachers, having internalized Hollywood's stock narrative of the ecstatically transformative teacher/student exchange, unfairly blame themselves when no such comparable metamorphoses occur in their own classrooms. Keroes also theorizes that Hollywood's selective, romanticized picture of the educational process may serve the function of "deflect[ing] society's guilt over the failure to compensate [teachers] adequately" (136). That is, if our teachers fail to meet expectations, it's not because we, as a society, have stingily refused to pay enough taxes to give them the tools needed to do their jobs properly; no, it's just because our child's instructor isn't another John Keating or Mark Thackeray!
Finally, in her most subversive speculation, Keroes posits that American elites may really prefer to have our culture's super-teachers confined solely to the silver screen, since a badly educated populace is also a submissive one, bowing to the powers-that-be (an explanation why so much in our public school system seems like indoctrination). But rather than presenting such intriguing ideas as her thesis, and then supporting them through a blend of literary and cinematic criticism, sociopolitical analysis, and personal observation, Keroes merely tosses off these points in the book's last pages, as if they're an after-thought. It's too little, too late.