High School Confidential

On Peter Shull's 'Why Teach?'

František Kupka, The Colored One, 1919-20, Oil on canvas

William, or “Mr. Able” as his students and colleagues know him, is having a crisis of faith. An English teacher in the far western flatness of Kansas, he too is being flattened — worn down by his fourth year of teaching at the high school from which he graduated, a job he fell into through haphazard idealism and his father’s school board connections. “It’s not the kids . . . and not their parents,” he explains in the opening pages of Why Teach?, Peter Shull’s earnest new novel. “It’s the admins . . . and the legislators.” Chief among the indignities the latter have visited upon him is their insistence on “test prep” as the overarching goal of education, along with the extirpation of literature from the secondary school curriculum. As the communication of his love for the classics of the American high school canon is his main source of pleasure in teaching, Mr. Able is becoming increasingly depressed.

Of course, there is also the respect and admiration of his high-spirited students to keep him going. He has developed a following among the jocks and more raucous elements of the school, whom the administration is only too happy to keep dumping on him as long as he keeps getting them through their standardized tests. He likes to think that his novelistic approach to lesson planning — setting context, drawing telling analogies, establishing a vocabulary before plunging into the full Sturm und Drang of the works — equips them with textual insights and a way of looking at the world that will carry them through life. But even this pleasure is fading. Bryce, one of his first students, a football playing golden boy and younger brother of a high school friend, has died in a car crash, speeding around a dangerous curve, most likely drunk. William mourns him, questioning the power of the lessons he imparted to Bryce and his other students to truly affect the course of their lives.

Nevertheless, he persists, playing a cat-and-mouse game with Mrs. Hirsche, the school’s head of literacy, whose job it is to observe teachers’ performance and make sure they are not deviating from the “new curriculum”: the training of students in the art of passing standardized multiple-choice reading comprehension tests. William cleverly mixes elements of the “old curriculum” — novels and poetry taught for literary value — with the rote literacy of the new standards, managing to get away with this approach through several of Mrs. Hirsche’s frowning classroom “walkthroughs.” Eventually, however, she calls him on the carpet, hands him a book entitled Stories Don’t Matter in the Real World, which, she claims, argues that there is “no clear relationship between reading these long works by the likes of Shakespeare and Arthur Miller and any sort of real-world preparedness.”

The receipt of this book has the same kind of world-shattering effect on Mr. Able that Lord Henry’s gift of the “poisonous book” had on Dorian Gay, sending him not into a life of debauchery but into a state of listlessness and despair. He becomes increasingly dissociated, going through the motions of teaching “like a high-functioning alcoholic,” coming home to fall asleep immediately, awakening in the middle of the night to watch television, then sleeping a few more hours before zombie-ing into work. Throughout the rest of the novel, we witness his herculean effort to cope with the idea that the literature he has grown up with, which constitutes the core of his education, is not sacrosanct, not a collectively recognized given, but a cultural object that must supply its own justification. He loses his motivation and connection to the blandishments of high school life. He skips out on the school’s big football game against its Dodge City rivals, choosing instead to drive to Wichita and party with his college buddy and his girlfriend, a fellow English teacher. He has a short, ill-fated fling over Christmas vacation with Kelsey, a law student and daughter of his parents’ country club chums, who will be clerking for his father’s law firm in the summer. He half-heartedly submits applications to law and grad schools, convincing himself that they will provide the escape he is seeking from the torments of his cognitive dissonance. Finally, he succumbs and spends the winter semester resentfully leading his students through skill-building exercises and sample multiple choice practice for their upcoming tests.

It’s hard to understand how a young and intelligent college graduate like William could be so floored by a challenge to his assumptions. It’s one thing to be affronted by an effort to remove the classics from the English curriculum, but for William the simple questioning of literature’s value opens up a black hole that sucks in all the certainties of his world. If The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible don’t matter, what does? If the Bard is dead, then everything is permitted. He has gone from high school to college and back to high school in his provincial hometown without ever questioning his life or values. That his conformity includes beliefs shared by the cultural cognoscenti doesn’t mean those beliefs stem from understanding and commitment so much as just going with the flow. Now that the flow has been interrupted, he must begin to think for himself . . . and not just about teaching. William becomes a kind of autodidact of everyday life, inductively reasoning from what he takes to be original observations to conclusions everyone already knows. “Good people behave in ways that are out of character all the time,” he tells us. The members of the country club his family belongs to, it turns out, prize wealth and status and might now view him as “a poor teacher and not someone who belonged here.” Highly attractive women, he incellishly opines, judge their suitors by “how much money we make.” Children, it seems, grow into replicas of their parents: “Despite her soon to be earned JD, ‘club wife’ might be [Kelsey’s] destined role in life and ‘club husband’ mine.”

Such ignorance about the world and his place in it, about social class, cultural conditioning, and the complexity of human motivations would seem to call into question just how much all his reading has contributed to William’s understanding and ability to navigate life. Perhaps the education that he and his students are so desperately in need of lies outside of books seen as fetish objects and instead in the cultivation of a critical self and social awareness. Socrates, after all, managed to bring his pupils to a new level of understanding without any homework or reading assignments, just the art of dialectic. Thinking outside the box might be the solution, but as the powers that be upend his expectations, William just wants his box back.

Luckily rescue arrives in the form of a phone call from Wichita. His college buddy’s girlfriend has actually read the evil book that William oddly has yet to crack. Stories Don’t Matter, it turns out, does not in fact argue for that position but instead examines the many pros and cons of teaching literature in the era of standardized testing, the internet, the changing job market and comes down on the side of literature. Shakespeare doth matter after all. Apparently, Mrs. Hirsche, the Head of Literacy, had not bothered to read the poisonous book either, or was insufficiently literate to understand it. Armed with this revelation, his students’ success in their pre-spring break testing, and acceptance letters from several of the law schools to which he had applied, Mr. Able is able to make it through the spring semester. He is back in his somewhat battered box. But does he want to stay there? The question remains, why teach?

William’s moment of truth comes while hot-tubbing with Jim Jr., the loutish junior partner in his father’s law firm, and three local hotties who Jim knows and tells William “would love to get down with you.” Jim toasts William’s last days of teaching and the big bucks he’ll be making when he graduates from law school, causing the ever-ambivalent William to blurt out that he’s not yet sure he’s going to go to law school, causing Dani, one of their female companions, to withdraw the hand she has been rubbing his thigh with and move away, causing William to experience another of his shocking epiphanies about human frailty: “her attraction to me was based on an untruth . . . that I would someday be a lawyer, presumably a rich one.” And there it is! William’s aristeia, the climactic moment, the pivot of his narrative arc, or to put it in terms of his beloved high school classics, his Huck Finn “all right, then, I’ll go to hell” moment, only substitutes continue teaching for hell. Infuriated, William leaps up from the bubbling cauldron, throws on his clothes and stalks off into the night. A few pages later, as school is closing for the summer, we learn that he will be returning to his job in the fall.

I didn’t like this book when I started reading it. The questions it addresses seemed like the kind of issues discussed on the PBS NewsHour or one of the topics that Mike Myers’ Linda Richman alter ego would announce before sending everyone off to “talk amongst yourselves.” A sober subject for the sober-minded bien pensant in a forum suffocated by too many shuttered Overton windows, that is to say, within the categorial framework of society’s managers not its liberators. Yet as I read on, I came to dislike myself for not liking it at first. The guileless sincerity of the protagonist’s, if not the author’s, voice, its squareness, is cringey, but spares the narrative the Blackboard Jungle / Stand and Deliver / Dangerous Minds clichés of the dedicated, noblesse oblige teacher “trying to reach these kids” who aren’t really bad, just misunderstood. By the same token it misses the rich resonance of pop cultural high school snark. No Spicoli classroom pizza delivery; no Dazed and Confused “awright, awright, awright”; no Wayne and Garth. Just William and his brooding, unironic experience of the High Plains plainness of everyday high school life. But why do I need irony and referentiality in the art I relate to? Isn’t it just an evasion of the stark reality Why Teach places before us? For I, too, think that stories matter.

So, mea culpa to this book and to myself. Narrative constitutes the world, even now when it is fragmented into short-form video, memes, tweets and Substack monstrosities. We need to know how to “read” them all, to comprehend how they make their meaning and determine whether that meaning coincides with our own. Stories give wings to our imaginations, and imagination — which takes us out of ourselves, connects us with others and other realities — is what is left of our humanity now that our reason has been fed to the machines. Someone has to transmit the semiotic gene to our future generations and mutations, show them how to take meaning from whatever form the dissemination of narrative knowledge assumes. That is why we must teach. It’s just not clear who’s up to the job.

David Polonoff is a satirist and novelist living in New York City. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, East Village Eye, and on his Substack, Tropelessness. His novel WannaBeat, detailing a misspent youth in San Francisco’s literary North Beach neighborhood, is available from Trouser Press Books and Amazon.