Twice this week, and both times in relatively prominent media spots, the summer-happy population of North America, delighted to be away from school and all things schoolish, has demonstrated how cool it is to loathe the teacher. “SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE” and “HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE MARIA?” are two “reality”-tv shows with a similar format: piles of wannabes from every corner of the continent showing their stuff to a panel of informed, experienced, tasteful, knowledgeable, and often generous evaluators. One or two at a time, as the season rolls on, they get weeded off, finally not because the judges say they’re not good enough but because the voting public doesn’t pick them. Doesn’t pick them, possibly because it’s so “obvious” they’re wonderful there’s just no need to cast a vote in their direction. But the central point of both shows is that after creating a short-list pool, the judges more or less disappear as functionaries. They keep making little speeches, showing off their deep knowledge and experience of dance or the theater or what have you, but nobody needs to listen to them anymore. And indeed, people make a distinct point of not listening.
So on both shows, a candidate of extreme capability and talent is discarded in order that more popular and lesser figures–figures the “teacher” types clearly don’t think are as good–can win. On “MARIA,” albeit the winner Elicia MacKenzie is pert, bouncy, and can sing in tune, the runner-up, Janna Polzin is clearly the better choice: she’s pure musical theater, what Andrew Lloyd-Webber actually called a “theater animal.” Why listen to Andrew Lloyd-Webber, though, if you’re thinking about casting a musical show? What could he know?
On “DANCE,” William Wingfield was sent on his way (back to studying with Debbie Allen, no doubt), this in the face of the fact that Nigel Lythgoe, the show’s executive producer and most flamboyant, not to say most knowledgeable, judge openly proclaimed a few weeks back that the kid ought to be dancing with the Alvin Ailey Company. While there are some very good dancers, and good entertainers, remaining behind, there is no one on the show with Wingfield’s versatility, polish, extension, or passion for dance. But, if you’re casting a terrific dancer, what could Nigel Lythgoe possibly know?
These moments suggest a much larger and more pervasive problem, one that encompasses our denigration of school even while we tout the merits of education; our fundamental loathing for the classroom process; our sense that school can be at best competitive, and that it had better prepare people for some function in our long-lived military-industrial complex; our anti-intellectualism; our conviction that if these persons who are committed to teaching could actually do anything in life, they’d give up teaching in a moment (“Those who can do, do; those who cannot, teach”). Political leaders pay no heed to their academically trained advisors. Our military leaders do not listen to our philosophers. The mass media is filled with low-brow drivel masquerading as wisdom, and anyone who points this out too vociferously is treated as a traitor to fundamental cultural values, since the media is holy. In movie treatments of the teacher-student relationship, the teacher inevitably perishes or disappears because at a critical moment he or she just doesn’t know how to be cool–watch the life history of Yoda carefully, for example. And films that crawl out on a limb to stress the importance of respecting one’s teacher–for instance, THE KARATE KID–are treated as hopelessly unhip. Better the BLACKBOARD JUNGLE model, where the teacher is beaten by his students, his precious culture trashed.
Here is Will, who won’t be America’s favorite dancer:
And here is Janna, who won’t be playing Maria:
Um – Elicia was more charming and had the better voice thus her win was appropriate. Just sayin’.