The Weekly Screed (#656)

Saving Captain Miller
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — In the film, Saving Private Ryan, when Tom Hanks’ character, Capt. Miller, reveals his civilian job — “I’m a schoolteacher” — it comes as a chastening surprise to his rebellious squad, and to the audience.

Although it should not. If you study the dialog in this superbly written (by Robert Rodat) film, you hear Capt. Miller repeatedly applying the Socratic method (answering a question with a question) to his conversations among the squad.

It’s hard for his soldiers to believe that a guy with what amounts to a lady’s job can be a manly leader of filthy, muscular, violent men locked in mortal combat. Capt. Miller appreciates the irony: “Back home, I tell people what I do for a living and they think well, now that figures. But over here, it’s a big, a big mystery.”

Here’s another mystery. America’s founders were a tiny brotherhood of intellectual elitists captivated and driven by the theories of the Enlightenment. This origin suggests a deep-rooted and abiding national reverence for learning and learned people. Yet, within two or three decades of our cerebral, argumentative and literate Revolution, we devolved a stubborn anti-intellectual tradition, typified by a contempt for the profession of teaching that’s almost unique in the world.

By the late 19th century, except for obstinate outposts of smarty-pantsism on the East Coast, a teacher in the vast agrarian expanse of the continent held one of her community’s least esteemed, worst paid and most precarious positions. One of my favorite passages of Michael Lesy’s history, Wisconsin Death Trip, begins, “Miss Mary Jeffrey, a teacher in one of the schools of Centerville, was badly beaten by one of her pupils, a 14-year-old girl…”

This routine dog-bites-man 1899 news item goes on, “…the girl rained blow after blow on the face of the defenseless teacher… She had just been pounded into unconsciousness when people attracted by the teacher’s screams ran in…”

Although adults rescued Miss Jeffrey from the “strong, husky country girl” (while classmates stood idly by, watching the blood fly), it’s reasonable to assume that their hearts were not entirely in it. Some of those parents likely saw Miss Jeffrey’s cuts, bruises and concussions as her just desserts for sinking down, willingly, among society’s losers. In Saving Private Ryan, a similar quandary affects the squad when Capt. Miller exposes his secret. The GIs turn suddenly meek, like little boys caught misbehaving in class. But there’s also a hint of betrayal, as they realize that their comrade-in-arms reports — in real life — to a traditional childhood enemy, the faculty of Thomas Alva Edison High School.

This dilemma is partly resolved just before the film’s climactic battle, when Pvt. Ryan (Matt Damon) confesses sheepishly to Capt. Miller how hard he and his late brothers had been on their teachers back in Iowa. Shades of Miss Mary Jeffrey.

When I read in the Times about Hannah Skandera, New Mexico’s “reformist” education chief, I thought of Capt. Miller and — soon after — of poor Miss Jeffrey. Skandera is constrained by modern squeamishness from abusing teachers with her flying fists. So she’s deploying subtler — but deadlier — WMD: high-stakes mass testing and the vague but toxic specter of something called “accountability.”

Hannah Skandera, like teacher-bashers dating back to Mary Jeffrey, has never stood in a classroom day after day facing the wrath of pupils eager (with their parents’ tacit approval) to hang her from the hat rack and beat her brains out. But she embodies the visceral mistrust Americans feel toward the arts of pedagogy.

Of course, teachers have had good moments. There was, reportedly, a brief turning toward the value of education early last century, leading to the birth of public schools and mandatory attendance as far as eighth grade. And, in the Sputnik panic, for a while, teachers — at least in math and science — got a grudging smidgeon of respect.

In the same Fifties, society seemed fleetingly open to the heresy that other factors — not just lazy, cynical teachers — were causing students to act up, turn rotten and flunk. But in The Blackboard Jungle, the movie that expressed that dangerous notion, the best parts are where the pupils beat up the teachers.

Meanwhile, teachers did themselves no favor when, to improve their lot as paid professionals with college degrees (although often from the widely derided two-year “normal schools” that produced Miss Mary Jeffrey), they joined the AFL-CIO amongst teamsters, steelworkers, machinists, socialists and Casey Jones.

By allying with Big Labor (without Big Pay), teachers worsened their social status and added the stigma of political leprosy. Public opinion accepted unionized cops and firemen because — we all understand — the community fabric would unravel without them. We need those guys. But who — we ask — needs teachers, especially if they join unions, indoctrinate innocent tots with Commie propaganda, spout Darwin, undermine Christian values and blackmail the taxpayers who could just as easily send the kids to Catholic school or home-school them on iPads?

The message we get from the permanent movement to debunk and dismantle the great American common school — and the parasites who teach in it — is as confused as Capt. Miller’s GIs. “Reformers” like Hannah Skandera proclaim ours the greatest nation on earth, but warn that our gloriousness is imperiled by the mediocrity of our teachers — whom we’ve always regarded as the apotheosis of mediocrity, whom we traditionally treat with contempt, who’ve been stereotyped for all our history as slightly seditious second-class citizens and seasonal laborers.
 
We’re advised that the solution to our educational “crisis,” which demagogues revive like clockwork in every generation, is to hunt down Miss Mary Jeffrey and — nowadays, alas, only figuratively — beat the living daylights out of her…

…while Capt. Miller, in that emerald cemetery just above Omaha Beach, rolls over in his fictional grave.