There’s a new film out, “The Teachers’ Lounge.” For anyone with an interest in leadership and followership I strongly recommend it.
The film is German and on the surface it’s about a teacher who loses control not just of her classroom, but of most of her sixth-grade students. A series of events turns traditional conceptions of power and authority on their head, essentially leaving inmates running the asylum. At one point the teacher, Carla Nowak, runs literally as well as metaphorically away from her students.
It matters that the film is German because until after the Second World War, no Western country was more closely identified with authoritarian leadership, with leaders (including teachers) who ruled with an iron fist than Germany. Obviously, those days are long gone. Still, it’s weird for a person of a certain age – in this case me! – to see a German classroom become bedlam. Whatever Ms. Nowak’s good intentions, whatever her efforts to teach, later to tame her students, there came a point in the film when all hell broke loose.
It’s no stretch to suggest that “The Teachers’ Lounge” is not just about keeping a modicum of order in the classroom. It’s a metaphor for keeping a modicum of order in society more generally, especially in societies that are liberal democracies.
Good democratic governance is hard to affect these days precisely because there’s a resemblance between the students in the film and the public at large – all of whom ostensibly are followers expected to follow those who ostensibly are leaders. This applies whether these leaders are teachers, ministers or managers, presidents, prime ministers, or chancellors.
But instead of following, of going along, we resist. We resist in the United States, and we resist in Germany. Too many of us lean too far right; vent our testiness and nastiness online; carp and complain even amidst abundance; resist and resent contributing to the commonweal; knowingly spread misinformation and disinformation; and remain seemingly deliberately uninterested and willfully uninformed.
Democracy is always good in theory and sometimes good in practice. But when communitarianism is sacrificed at the altar of individualism it leads straight to The Teachers’ Lounge.