I: Teaching the children in the 1960s
In 1936, William Wyler directed These Three, a film which follows two teachers who are wrongly accused of a scandalous act by one of their disgruntled students. The accusation? One of the women is in love with the other’s fiancé. This is not at all what Lillian Hellman intended when, two years earlier, she wrote the play the film is based on, but the Hays Code prohibited Wyler from faithfully adapting the play and its main conflict, which centered on an unrequited lesbian romance.
Twenty-five years later, in 1961, Wyler gave Hellman’s play another go, casting Aubrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine as the two teachers, and restoring Hellman’s original title, The Children’s Hour. The weakening of the Hays Code (it would only officially cease its censorship in 1968) meant that Wyler could tackle Hellman’s play without self-censoring and glossing over its social criticism.
Hepburn plays Karen Wright, the lively head teacher of a girls’ school which she runs with her best friend Martha Dobie, played by a controlled Shirley MacLaine. It’s clear that the women enjoy their work as much for the freedom and power that it allots them as they do for the instruction itself. In the first act, we see the kind of management that goes into the running of their small institution: book-keeping, maintaining inventory, disciplining the students. In fact, there is very little time spent in the classroom itself. Instead, the film jumps from the girls’ dorms, where they gossip, argue, and steal from each other, to the teachers’ private quarters, where personal matters—familial and romantic—are discussed.
The film’s censored predecessor peeks in through the character of Joe Cardin (James Garner), Karen’s boyfriend-turned-fiance. Martha’s cold affect towards him could very well have represented the same jealousy that made up the conflict in These Three—an unrequited love towards him—but Wyler shows us so many moments of tenderness and shared secret looks between Martha and Karen that Martha’s turmoil is instantly recentered to being about the loss of Karen instead of the loss of Joe.
This tension is brought to a boiling point when Mary (Karen Balkin), a disobedient young girl, tells her rich, distant grandmother that her two teachers are engaging in a lesbian love affair. Her grandmother Lily, a sensationally strict and proper Miriam Hopkins, alerts the other parents of the students, who immediately take their daughters out of the school.
Their immediate and unwavering action reveals an important social anxiety: that teachers are not only responsible for their children’s education, but for the maintenance of their innocence as well. Curriculum and pedagogy weigh less in importance than the identity and moral fiber of the teacher; any kind of exposure to immoral characteristics can taint these vulnerable and impressionable children. They must be protected not from misleading teachings or violence (in the film, Mary gets spanked by Joe without anyone raising any kind of fuss), but moral impropriety. In The Children’s Hour, even the suggestion of homosexuality sends parents into a frenzy.
“How could a child that age even know about such things? She could hardly invent them,” Mary’s grandmother asserts confidently. Yet we have seen Mary lie, cheat, steal, and eavesdrop; we have also seen the girls read through a book that elicited a fit of giggles and sent them scrambling to hide it as soon as they heard the approaching footsteps of a teacher. Mary’s grandmother is simultaneously perpetuating the overprotection of young girls’ innocence and discrediting their creativity and desire to learn about life outside of their school walls. The girls understand that within the role they’re expected to play lies an integral ignorance of the world; this is something that offers Mary leverage in brewing the rumor that shutters Miss Dobie and Miss Wright’s school.
It’s notable that the two teachers’ school is just collateral damage for Mary; she has no real grudge against the institution itself, nor any legitimate grievances to wish to bring it down. Her pursuit is mainly in the service of rectifying her feelings of abandonment. She recognizes that the area in her life which wields her the most power is her studentship and the trust given to her teachers by her guardian. Insinuating that this trust was broken, and that the young girls were exposed to unseemly activities, would achieve her aim of reuniting with her grandmother. She understands the salacious nature of her lie: when she first tells it, she asks to whisper it in her grandmother’s ear so that their driver doesn’t overhear her. Mary, therefore, is not as innocent as her grandmother supposes; she understands what she is saying and its consequences. And the fact that it is she, a young girl, who shares it only strengthens the outrage.
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Eight years after the release of The Children’s Hour, a different educator sauntered onto our screens: one Miss Jean Brodie, portrayed by a spectacular Maggie Smith in an Oscar-winning role. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), set in an Edinburgh girls’ school in the 1930s, the titular Miss Brodie is a lover of the finer things in life: art, music, and sex. She feels Mussolini—whom she refers to in Italian as Il Duce—is an exemplary leader, and is similarly militant in her approach to shaping her students to reflect her beliefs and ideals. She specifies how she views her role as a teacher in the first act of the film: “I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl of an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”
The same kinds of anxieties that underlie the panic of the parents in The Children’s Hour only galvanize Miss Brodie; she is aware of her students’ innocence but instead of protecting and nurturing it, is hell-bent on rupturing it by introducing them to worldliness. This is done through both personal and global means: in one lecture, she reminisces in detail about her past lovers and trysts, in the next, she sings the praises of fascism.
It is this openness that attracts students to her, and she takes a select few girls under her wing, whom she names the “Brodie girls.” There’s Jenny (Diane Grayson), whom Miss Brodie proclaims to be a future “lover”; Mary (Jane Carr), a new arrival with a stutter whom Miss Brodie views as a project; and Sandy (Pamela Franklin), a shrewd and intelligent girl whom Miss Brodie adopts as her eventual successor. She takes her girls on weekend trips to the countryside and confides in them the romantic details of her life. Other faculty take notice of this clique—the headmistress most of all—but there is nothing to be done until Miss Brodie overreaches her grasp, and her guidance to Mary to join Franco’s fascist Spanish army leads to the young girl’s death.
Sandy, distraught at Mary’s demise, turns on her instructor and relays to the headmistress all that Miss Brodie has done, taught, and said. Miss Brodie enticed the girls with her candor and trust in them, but her desire to shape and mold them into limiting roles ultimately resulted in her downfall. She exacted too much influence and control; she was not interested in teaching, but leading.
She says as much in one of the first lessons we observe. Speaking to her class of young girls, she decries their school, which she diagnoses as wishing to “stay the same to the point of petrification.” She then adds: “I do not intend to devote my prime to petrification.” Her intent is to propel her students forward, politically and intellectually, but she does this not by introducing her cohort to information that departs from the conservative leanings of her school, but by generating a cult of personality with herself in the center. This pressure to focus on person and personality instead of ideas ultimately orients her students towards a complacency for fascism, an authoritarian ideology that places great importance on hierarchy. Beyond her open love for Mussolini and Franco, Miss Brodie espouses other fascistic tenets, including the idea that her students are not all equal, leading her to show preference to the ones she views as exceptional (or, rather, most receptive to her “teachings”).
It is notable that Miss Brodie tends to hide her personal beliefs and inclinations from the other faculty; she even instructs her students to prop up their books to make it seem as though they are learning the school curriculum before she goes on one of her tangents. In the innocence of students, Miss Brodie finds a malleable target, and by being overtly honest about her exploits and qualifying them as aspirational, she is able to capture their minds. It is really only the worst outcome—death—which is able to bring her down. The Children’s Hour and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie show how students’ innocence can be used as a means to exact control; in the former, the student wields it over the teacher, in the latter, it’s the other way around.
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II: Teaching the children in the 2020s
Today, most films focus on day schools, rather than boarding schools where students live onsite. This means that parents often play an even bigger role in the social fabric that drapes the school; their presence takes up as much of the day as the teachers occupy. With boarding schools, the mechanism of trust extends to encompass survival; the school is not only responsible for the students’ education, but for their health and nutrition. In her bildungsroman Sweet Days of Discipline, Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy puts it aptly: “A boarding school is a strong institution, since in a sense it is founded on blackmail.”
When a parent has more involvement in their child’s day-to-day life, the teacher’s role is shaped by their influence, too. So is the case in the German drama The Teachers’ Lounge (2023), directed by İlker Çatak, which follows teacher Carla (Leonie Benesch) during a tense couple of days when a string of thefts are uncovered within the school. One of Carla’s students is suspected but, believing in his innocence, she leaves the camera recording on her laptop in the teachers’ lounge and discovers that a member of the faculty may be responsible.
She shares the video with the principal who immediately suspends the faculty member—who also happens to be the mother of Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), one of Carla’s students. Carla’s actions raise concerns from the students, faculty, and parents alike: Why was blame first attributed to a student? How can it be proven that all of the thefts are related? Isn’t leaving a camera rolling a breach of privacy?
As the answers to these questions merge with one another, conflating justice with truth, and privacy with culpability, Carla finds that whatever power she held over her class shatters in one go. One morning, she enters her classroom to find that the students are on strike. They’re refusing to speak in solidarity with their classmate and his mother. A couple of days later, the student newspaper prints an in-depth story recounting this scandal, featuring the points of view of both Carla and the mother, and accuses the school of distrusting its students.
In the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Brodie trusts her students with sensitive information about the world and her own personal life. Recognizing this trust, her students take to her and grow loyal and obedient. In the Teachers’ Lounge, the students desire a trust that is not centered around the academic and the worldly, but one that revolves around autonomy; they wish to be trusted to form decisions about truth and character. When Carla breaches this autonomy by embroiling herself in the bureaucratic protocols that accompany a theft on school property, she aligns herself with a system that implicates students as culpable first and only later entertains their innocence. She comes to learn that her authority as a teacher is conditional; in complying with the school’s protocols, she loses the influence she had before.
Unlike Miss Brodie, Carla is passionate about the subject she teaches (math); we see her plan engaging lessons and help students understand the concepts. If a teacher’s power were derived solely through pedagogy, Carla would be inscrutable. But as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie shows, the character of the teacher is intrinsically tied in with their interpersonal reach; as soon as her students begin to doubt her moral fiber, Carla’s lessons earn no participation or feedback. The idea that the classroom is an apolitical exchange of information is heartily disproven in The Teachers’ Lounge, where the students act upon their communal power to display their hurt and anger to their teacher.
Carla picks up on this. In the final scene of the film, she literally locks the principal and the other school administrators out of the classroom in an attempt to mend her relationship with Oskar and regain his trust, knowing that this would extend to the rest of his peers.
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In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (2023), we’re shown the fickle nature of power in school through a different faculty: anger and catharsis. Minato (Sōya Kurokawa) is a young boy who is slowly realizing that his feelings for the class outcast, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), are something beyond friendship. Yori is regularly abused by his father for being effeminate and different from the other boys, and told he has a pig’s brain instead of a human’s. As a young boy already grappling with his feelings and the volatile atmosphere of his school, Minato now also has to deal with the rage and confusion that accompanies the knowledge that his closest friend is being abused. One day, he appropriates Yori’s story: he tells his mother that his teacher Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama) told him that he had a pig’s brain, causing his mother to stir a scandal at the school, eventually leading to Mr. Hori’s dismissal.
Minato wants justice for Yori—partly because he feels for his friend and partly because he feels like his friend—but he understands that his grasp is limited as a child. He has no means of recourse for an adult like Yori’s father, but he does have the ability to get at his teacher through his mother. If Mr. Hori were punished, at least one adult would be facing retribution; whether it is justified or not is of less importance to enact catharsis. Minato even confesses to his principal who, in response, hands him a trombone and picks up a French horn herself, before instructing him: “whatever you can’t tell anyone, blow it away.” They proceed to fall into a discordant tone, blowing into their instruments as hard as they can.
Catharsis is important, especially for children who struggle to understand their emotions. Carla, in The Teachers’ Lounge, understands this: following her students’ strike, she begins one class by instructing them to scream as loud as they can to release tension. But catharsis can be temporary relief; uncertainty, rage, and guilt often dig their claws deeper into us than we can understand. Mr. Hori’s punishment and banishment understandably do little to soothe Minato, but we see how the boy’s lie spirals through every ring of the school’s faculty before exploding into the community. Yet, like Carla, Mr. Hori still attempts to reach out to Minato and Yori when he uncovers the truth of their relationship; his sense of responsibility and care stretches beyond the classroom.
There is also much to say about how these two films, released in the same year, are shot. Catak films The Teachers’ Lounge from the perspective of Carla: we follow her throughout each day, as the scandal she desperately tries to allay grows out of control. Conversely, Kore-eda structures Monster as a triptych: set in the same timeframe, we first follow Minato’s mother, then Mr. Hori, and finally Minato himself, to see how his lie fuels the breakdown of his classroom. These opposing approaches conclude in the same result: a depiction of the student-teacher relationship as fragile and delicate, defined by an interplay of power which holds parents and administrators in its balance and is shatterable by the smallest lie, but also, ultimately, almost always salvageable.
In their own ways, these four films demonstrate how the classroom is held stringently within the social constraints of its time; social anxieties are amplified when they are applied to a student because teachers are often the first adults outside of the family home that young children are exposed to. In school, for the first time, parents are unable to control everything that their child hears and sees, and this anxiety of corruption is placed squarely on the shoulders of the teacher. However, as children grow and mature, they find their own ways of exploiting this unease for their own goals, by turning their guardians against their teacher (The Children’s Hour and Monster), going to the administration (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), or simply banding with one another (The Teachers’ Lounge).
In each of these films, the common adage that children are blank slates when they enter school is challenged. In each unique exploration, we find that students are formed and informed by their home life and the glimpses that they get of the world around them, while teachers, as mature, worldly adults, are tasked with trying to bridge the gap between them. Whomever advances first in reaching the other is the one who wields the power.