Beyond Apples and Ice Cream: The Teacher-Student Relationship as Cinematic Romance, 1909–1939

In 1936, the Our Gang one-reeler Bored of Education won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject. In the film, students prepare for the first day of school by hatching a plan to play hooky, a plan that in turn has to be undone when they realize two things: the new teacher is beautiful, and she is welcoming the class with ice cream.¹

This ice-cream party is a reciprocal act. In the Our Gang classroom, students offer their teachers apples even as the teachers give them ice cream. And as the apples are a bid on the part of students for approval and affection from their teacher, ice cream is a teacher’s attempt for the same from students. This exchange of apples and ice cream provided modern Americans with an object lesson about schooling. The message was that teachers and students were beholden to one another, each charged with winning the other over.

This was simple enough, and proved to be engaging Oscar fare. More complex, however, were a number of earlier films that had explored the same subject.² When we cast our eyes backward beyond Bored of Education, delving into the basal genealogy of motion pictures about schooling, we find that from the beginning of narrative cinema, the relationship between students and teachers was rendered according to dictates of that most basic of genres: the romance. Nine films made before 1936 show us that during the early twentieth century, students and teachers were invariably portrayed as drawn more to each other than to academics. Their affective bond was represented in multiple, often overlayered ways—a melodramatic entwinement, a substitute for family, an attempted courtship, an erotic encounter—that provided a larger backstory for the give and take of apples and ice cream.

“Love Them, Every One”

The very idea of a teacher preoccupied with winning students over was rather new to the twentieth century. Previous to this time, the dominant paradigm for relations between schoolteachers and students—shaped by longstanding beliefs that the will of a child had to be bent and even broken in order to conform to that of adults—was one of teacher-imposed discipline.³ But by the turn of the century, this view had begun to be supplanted by theories that highlighted the importance of the interests and desires of students. This newer approach derived from a deepening recognition of the emotional lives of children, or what pedagogist Jasper Bennett had in 1888 called the “heart culture” of pupils.⁴ John Dewey put it this way: “Things hardly come within [the child’s] experience unless they touch, intimately and obviously, his own well-being, or that of his family and friends. His world is a world of persons with their personal interests, rather than a realm of facts and laws. Not truth, in the sense of conformity to external fact, but affection and sympathy, is its keynote.”⁵ Applying these ideas to practice, educator William Hawley Smith charged teachers with the task of reaching students on the personal, affective level. Wondering in 1912 how teachers in an era of enforced compulsory schooling might manage to educate “all the children of all the people,” he judged that it would be more a job for the heart than the head: “First of all, we shall love them, every one, ‘not with allowance, but with genuine love.’” ⁶

But along with loving, there was the increasingly important matter for teachers of being loved. Education textbooks of the time put a new emphasis on the physical attractiveness of teachers.⁷ The degree to which students approved of and enjoyed their teachers began to be measured by means of classroom surveys, or what Syracuse professor Orlie M. Clem called “truth-revealing instruments.” These surveys encouraged teachers to be concerned about such questions as: “What do my students think of my humor? Do I seem to them arbitrary or open-minded? Do they consider my attitude to be one of friendship or ‘wiser than thou, holier than thou’?”⁸ Friendship between teachers and students was now...