Education in Popular Culture

5 Hot for teacher (p. 86-87)

[T]he educational process involves an emotionally suffused link between human beings. Its intimacies form a tangled web of intellectual aspiration and erotic desire. In our culture, the idea of education is inextricably bound up with constructions of power, governance, and an erotically charged allegiance or submission to the father- (or . . . mother-) teacher. (Barreca and Denenholz Morse, 1997, p. vii)

The claim that teaching and learning are erotic acts is based on a conception of Eros as a life force that pervades human interactions both with other people and with the environment. Alison Pryer (2001, p. 80) argues that pedagogy involves an initiation in which ‘the teacher breaks the student, bringing the student into the death space in order to give new life’. This metaphor is unsettling. Pryer believes that the power relations explicit in technical/rational schooling constitute a violent imposition and points to the way in which schooling is concerned with disciplining the body and suppressing desire but contends that, given the power of Eros and desire, it cannot succeed in such a project.

Elizabeth Atkinson (2003, p. 1) has referred to the

sexual anonymity demanded of teachers and researchers within all phases of education [which] is representative of a wider silencing, or neutralising, of identity for those involved in the teaching profession, which contrasts oddly with discourses of sexuality embedded in the interactions of children and young people within and beyond the context of schooling.

Outside sex education, and to some extent even within it, there is little talk of sex in formal debates about educational practice, except in the context of regulation, transgression and abuse. However, popular culture is suffused with sex, so talking about representations of education in popular culture inevitably leads to discussions about sex.

Johnson (2005, p. 134) has characterised popular culture as being ‘saturated with warnings to teachers who conflate passion and teaching’. She warns of the dangers of denying that a sexual dynamic can exist in relationships between teachers and students and urges the development of an understanding of ‘. . . the difference between what McWilliam (1996) terms pedagogical eroticism and pedagogical abuse’ (ibid.). In other words, mature recognition of sexual dynamics enables them to be managed in socially, morally and ethically responsible ways. ‘The Maginot line is clearly breached when teachers physically act on their desires by engaging in a sexual relationship with students’ (ibid., p. 146).

For young people in co-educational secondary education, school is often experienced as an arena of sexual competition, tension and opportunity. This is an assertion that could be underlined by a study not only of the commercial products of popular culture (for example, teen magazines, teenage fiction and pop music), but by any sample of graffiti in any school. There is a complex mix of emotional exploration and maturation that is acknowledged within the formal curriculum through ‘sex education’ and informally through peer cultures. (See Epstein and Sears (1999) for a series of papers discussing, inter alia, sexism, homophobia, abortion and HIV as issues in pedagogy.