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I tend to agree with SR that ideally we would certainly expect teachers and other guardians of the young to refrain from any relationship that savoured of favouritism or - well - les amitiés particulières. It's clearly a bad look to cultivate sexual envy and distraction, quite apart from the fact that the task of the sensitive and intelligent teacher (are there any left in the Anglo-world?) is to channel the intrinsic eroticism of the pupil-teacher relationship away from themselves and towards their subject. I would never have tolerated nineteenth-century German history in the 6th form had it not been for a teacher who both attracted my love and loyalty and deflected it skillfully toward the subject of his expertise. That is what a true teacher can do - boy-lover or not. Our education system might be slightly less shit if we talked openly about the erotics of pedagogy - and about its necessary (and costly) sublimation. We might also pay our teachers more - and have more men entering the profession - if that were the case. Still, most people are not saints, and even the best of us are are tripped up from time to time. Our culture has abandoned any distinction between 'ideal' and 'mandate': between the perfect situation that we would like to uphold and the baseline beneath which malefactors must be punished. Between our declining moral standards and our inflated, actuarial paranoia we have squeezed out Purgatory: all that remains is the Paradise of amoral official approval and the Inferno of abject transgression. I definitely would not want to encourage teachers, scoutmasters, priests or choirmasters to engage in intimate relationships with particular boys. In fact, I would want very emphatically to discourage them from this. Not because it is an unspeakable monstrosity, but because it is precisely the kind of pedestrian temptation to which anyone of less than a truly heroic constitution could succumb. We should admit these temptations openly, and talk about their dangers. Still, we need standards. What are schools without them? I'm prepared for teacher/pupil sex to be a sacking offence in serious cases. I'm prepared for transgressors to be given a right bollocking by headmaster (both of them, since the boy shouldn't get off easily). I'm prepared for it to be a source of embarrassment and shame for all concerned, at least for a little while. But more than that? Should the law get itself involved where no one wants it? No. The wren goes to ’t, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight. I also had a very good English teacher who introduced me to Shakespeare at an impressionable age - but that's a different story. |