Bad Teachers
For those not aware, I am a teacher at a public university. This is the first full-time position I accepted after defending my PhD in 2019, which was the culmination of eleven years of college. But I think about one thing every day: every single teacher, every single one, everywhere, was once a student. Teachers never stop learning, so I guess we’re always students, which is really an awesome and profound thing to get to experience. More broadly, because every single human being knows something we don’t, it’s possible for everyone to be a lifelong student. To me that’s a big part of what gets me out of bed every morning.
Many teachers inspired me along the way—but not always in an immediately positive way. Between elementary and undergraduate education, I had teachers who: insisted (it was on the test) that the Civil War was not about slavery; insulted the George W. Bush presidential campaign to such an extent that a student, hurt and frustrated, yelled “this isn’t going to be on the test!” and walked out; suggested certain students (including me) were going to burn in hell; spent a good part of every class criticizing the Clinton administration, and when reported for doing this, moved the whole class outdoors to a remote part of the athletics field to double down; spent class time telling us about the contradictions and atrocities in the Bible (it wasn’t even a course on religion).
Note that I went only to public schools, from first grade until my last graduation. When I think back, what stands out to me is how those experiences affected me. Broadly, I think they were part of how I developed a lifelong suspicion of self-righteousness and those who wield it, which has often led me (for better and for worse) to resist “joining” much of anything. Every one of those interactions was polarizing—it involved an “us” and a “them” being defined by an authority figure to a captive audience—but instead of being offended when My Side was being attacked and silently applauding when Their Side was the target, I consistently found myself deeply suspicious of, if not repulsed by, these acts.
For the record, not only did the teachers I just mentioned ultimately inspire me (if perhaps not entirely in the ways they intended), none of the teachers I mentioned (who shall remain forever anonymous) were, in my view, “bad teachers.” These teachers, and every other teacher I had, are smart, flawed, well-intentioned human beings with blind spots, prejudices, limited perspectives, sacred cows, and third rails. And in the end, I didn’t just “get through” those courses but probably wouldn’t be a teacher today without those experiences. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned coalesced into a silent and ongoing vow to avoid ever behaving in those ways in front of a classroom; to keep my own religious and political leanings and opinions at arm’s length in teaching as best I can; to try to be open to listening, especially when students are struggling with the ideas being presented in class.
I spent over a decade of my life learning what I need to know to be a teacher. I started teaching full-time the year the pandemic hit and found myself not just occupying the position of a teacher, but having to be a counselor, information technology specialist, public relations spokesperson, and more, simultaneously. At the same time, I hear people in my profession compared to Stalin, Hitler, child molesters, devil worshipers, and the Inquisition—not by students but by publics, press, pundits, and politicians—even by friends and family. People who have never taken one of my classes or read any of my work have “informed” me that I am advancing some nefarious agenda (that must be “fought,” perhaps violently) merely by doing my job. I have been ridiculed, bullied, and even threatened in my private life for doing the things I am trained to do—trying to make sense of social complexity, especially in complex times, and in doing so, distinguishing fact from opinion and evidence from propaganda. If I did not so love what I do, it would be hard not to take these things personally, and not to feel pretty damned unappreciated as a result.
I am a sociologist. I think that means I study human interaction and the social world that arises from it. I also think that means that it’s possible to make sense of interactions and why they arise—everything is information. The information I gather from these interactions suggests at least two things to me: first, rather obviously, that a significant minority of people mistrust not so much me, but what I do for a living. Second, that people see my job as especially important, and see me as a person who has power or status; and who is, or should be, held accountable to them for how I do my job. Trust and accountability require interaction; if I cannot interact with people, I cannot earn their trust or be held accountable, so let me try to put some of this into words.
In my “religion and politics” course, I teach how religious worldviews influence political interests, and how the importance of this often gets overlooked by scholars and other public figures. I teach how religious and racial/ethnic shifts in the U.S. are a big part of explaining the cultural and political polarization occurring today, as well as how, and why, the world is getting both more religious and less religious at the same time. To me, describing these aspects of the social world, and how they impact us, as accurately as I can, is a full-time job and then some. I just don’t have time to engage in the kinds of ideological flights of fancy I (very occasionally) witnessed in school, even if I wanted to (and to restate, I emphatically don’t). It would be a distraction, at best, and would alienate students at worst.
Public trust must be earned and continually renewed for public education to continue to best function as a public good. To me, this means that I must show that I can be trusted not to unduly cross into other domains of social life in doing my job. In the words of literary critic Stanley Fish: do my job, don’t try to do someone else’s job, and don’t let anyone else do my job. In the words of W.E.B. DuBois, this ideal should be upheld to retain public trust in scholarship and to ensure that people in a democracy can best make use of knowledge. In the words of Max Weber, the closer to politics our subject matter comes, the more we are obligated to avoid partisanship, to save that for outside the classroom, where criticism is possible and there is not the power imbalance.
More practically (and perhaps cynically) speaking, institutions don’t survive because they are built on some vision of how people ought to be; they must be resilient in the face of how people actually are. Because I love math, and Americans often seem to trust math, here’s some math. Out of seventeen years of school (K-12 plus four years’ undergrad—grad school is a different animal), I witnessed five teachers “crossing the line.” Figure that I had contact with an average of six teachers per school year, conservatively, so 6 x 17 = 102 teachers total. 5 divided by 102 is about .049—less than five percent of all the teachers I interacted with in seventeen years. Again, I didn’t like their style and think they stepped over the line, but they weren’t “bad teachers.” In fact, I never had a “bad teacher”—I had some I didn’t like, or who seemed too rigid or too difficult, or who I didn’t get along with—but never “bad” in some comprehensive sense. Realistically, “line-crossing,” as well as not liking personality, content, or style still presents an opportunity to learn—in or out of the classroom, sometimes we can learn the most from the most difficult people. Maybe my case is unique (I am sure it’s not) but this should still give some cause to question how warranted all this mistrust of teachers really is.
To the second point: I am not against accountability—I am, after all, a person who works in a “public” profession. But I would start by pointing out that many of these sorts of argument vastly overestimate how much power teachers actually have. If someone knows how to groom or brainwash or indoctrinate students in the ways sometimes suggested by publics, pundits, and politicians, I think most teachers would use those tools for one thing only: to convince students to complete assigned readings and turn assignments in on time. Because teachers cannot even do this with anything approaching a 100% success rate, we must be patient and empathetic and find realistic ways to encourage students to strive for excellence and to do well in day-to-day assignments, which is, again, a full-time job. Of the five teachers I think “crossed the line,” they all were smart people, who spoke to a captive audience, and who brought their expertise to bear. In zero of those five cases was I even slightly “indoctrinated.” In fact, if what I learned was how I didn’t want to be, that would be, by definition, the exact opposite of indoctrination, right?
I’m not denying that teachers have an influence on people’s lives—that would be equally preposterous. But teachers are just one “agent of socialization” during our lives. Socialization (again, I am a sociologist) is the process by which people learn how to become people from other people. The first agents of socialization are your parents, who begin to make decisions about who you’re going to be before you’re even born. They spend the most time with you in your early life when learning language and trust and other really big things development-wise happen. That’s primary—stage one—socialization. In conjunction, many of us were raised in a religion, which usually begins early on, as well, and which shapes how we see the world and other people, as well as what we think are the right and wrong ways to think and (inter)act. Then there are our siblings, and our peer group—who also influence us.
All these things are already well on their way before we set foot in a classroom. In fact, a lot of who we are does not come from education but from all the other things that happen outside, and before, school begins. I spent eleven years in college and have been with my wife for 22 years. I have had parents for over four decades. Which of these do you think has the least influence over who I am? There is always possible, if not actual, tension between primary socialization (family and religion) and secondary socialization (education and peer groups). It’s not new, and it’s not going away, and it’s going to be more difficult for some than others to manage because the world we live in is changing so fast in certain ways, and it is the job of teachers like me to help prepare students to live in that world. But even if teachers and schools could give into all the demands of those primary socialization agents (logically they can’t, because students’ families and religion vary widely and are therefore making contradictory demands), it would not change the fact that you’re going to learn at least some things in school and from peers that come into tension with at least some of the things your family and religion teach you. Learning to consider and negotiate different viewpoints is an essential part of living in a free and open society, and unless we’re ready to abandon that project (I emphatically am not), then we each must learn to negotiate this tension in ongoing and productive ways.
As someone who is in the business of lifelong learning, I invite everyone, Blue Team, Red Team, true believer or dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, to consider fairly and carefully your own experiences in education in these terms, because maybe my experience was particularly unusual. I confidently suspect most people had teachers they didn’t like and teachers that abused their power, but probably a lot more teachers who really worked to help you succeed to the best of your ability (and kept the polemics and preaching out of the classroom). If some of the new ideas emerging in education make you uncomfortable, I would, as a lifelong student, advocate only that you visit your local library and do the hard work of researching those ideas, what they are about, and what they mean, directly, from firsthand sources. Forming views second- or third-hand based on a social media feed, search engine history, political ad, or favorite cable news source will always be biased in a way that confirms what you already want to believe, because these sources are literally designed to do this. That is gossip, not knowledge. I think that what you will find, in reading and researching, is that there are some ideas that make sense, some that don’t, and some that you’d want to learn more about. Welcome to the party.
Sources:
Bright, Liam Kofi. 2018. “Du Bois’ Democratic Defence of the Value-Free Ideal.” Synthese 195:2227-45.
Fish, Stanley. 2008. Save the World on Your Own Time. New York: Oxford University Press.
Weber, Max. 1948. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber, Edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.
Image: Max Weber, 1918, public domain
