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A Note on the Scandals: The Role of Filmic Fantasy in Reproducing Teaching and its Transgressions

2015; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-94-017-7191-7_7

2214-9767

James Stillwaggon, David Jelinek,

Digital Games and Media

Teachers have lately come to find themselves scandalized in the public eye, their status shifted from ascetic saints to sinners of various sorts. While the reasons for this shift are manifold, the public outcry over teacher scandals derives its force from a mistaken but powerful fantasy of the teacher as beyond desire. In this essay, we consider the contribution made to this fantasy of teaching by popular cinema. While the teaching ideal follows the same patterns as any fantasy in its negation of the social order, this negation makes the teacher’s identity particularly prone to scandal insofar as the teacher’s role is also understood as a bastion of social law. The upshot of this fantasy is that fulfilling the ideal of teaching requires breaking its laws: an impossible position that we illustrate through a varied selection of films about schooling.