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Fooled into Education: School of Rock and the Trickster-Teacher
- Scott Neumeister, PhD
- 19 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Education is the art of enticing the soul to emerge from its cocoon, from its coil of potentiality and its cave of hiding. Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities … but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed.
Thomas Moore, The Education of the Heart
“Who makes Achilles a new set of armor?” “What Olympian gods and goddesses side with the Trojans?” “Who is Hector’s son?” The questions flew rapidly, one after another, in my seventh-grade English classroom as semester exam preparation progressed. The answers were exactly the type of information that the students would be expected to know for their upcoming test. Except, rather than I quizzing them, the students were quizzing me! I presented them with a challenge: pepper me with any questions they wanted regarding the plot of The Iliad; any question I got wrong meant the entire class got an extra credit point on the upcoming exam. Of course, their questions progressed from easy to hard, and yes, I answered incorrectly a few times (on purpose? I’ll never tell!). But for a solid chunk of time in the classroom, the power structure was inverted, and twenty “teachers” quizzed the “student” at the front…all while themselves investigating, hearing, and internalizing all the bits of information they needed to review, as well as thoroughly enjoying every moment.
This is one of my proudest moments as a trickster-teacher, an archetype blend that comes to me quite naturally. Many of my lessons contained what I label a “spinach-in-the-ice-cream” approach: some element of sweetness on the surface that belied the nutritional goodness of the information being imparted. In 2003, when I decided to switch from a career in information technology to middle school teaching, I watched (and loved) School of Rock. Although its influence on me was completely unconscious, I later realized that Dewey Finn (Jack Black) embodies the spirit of this combination, and I would like to explore how this mixture works as well in the film as it did in my own experience.
From slacker to shapeshifter, from pretense to passion
Perennially lazy Dewey Finn, kicked out of his band and desperate for rent money, intercepts a call meant for his roommate, Ned Schneebly, offering a long-term substitute teaching job at a prestigious private school. This is when Dewey’s trickster forms a plan: to pretend to be Ned and gain the needed income. Generally unambitious about doing “real work,” he appears at the school as “Mr. S.” and initially intends just to be a glorified babysitter for the fifth graders. When he hears his students in band class, however, his plan evolves—he will teach them to become his group for an upcoming (and lucrative) battle of the bands.
Here begins Dewey’s journey into the teacher archetype, and its hallmarks are abundant. He quickly grasps the various musical and non-musical talents of all his class members and guides them into the roles that fit each perfectly. Knowing that the students have never done anything like this before, he infuses his teaching with a confidence-boosting belief in their ability to grow into their roles. He fosters a collaborative sense of unified purpose, creating a sort of “collective heroes’ journey” for the class, a concept that my Joseph Campbell Foundation colleague John Bucher has explored.
Breaking the rules, watering the hidden seed
Of course, the trickster continues to be at play through Dewey. He has shapeshifted into a middle school teacher and convinces both the students and the uptight principal (Joan Cusack) that he is indeed “legitimate.” Moreover, his actions—testing and subverting a rigid system—very much aligns with trickster behavior: “If you wanna rock, you gotta break the rules” is one of his mantras. This matches one of Joseph Campbell’s articulations of the trickster function: “[the trickster] represents the power of the dynamic of the total psyche to overthrow programs.” Besides overthrowing the curriculum, Dewey contravenes the school’s practice of a rigid and joyless approach to education. Maximizing creativity and individuality, Dewey’s ethos of rock-as-rebellion provides relief from the school’s stuffy culture, all while still providing education of a different sort and skills beyond a normative curriculum. Dewey’s trickster brings balance to the program, and therefore the totality of the psyche.
“If you wanna rock, you gotta break the rules”
One of the most poignant examples of Dewey’s teacher archetype in action comes with the arc of a student named Zack (Joey Gaydos, Jr.). The film introduces Zack as a shy guitarist, fearful of the rock genre because of his overbearing father’s insistence that he only play classical music. Dewey’s mentorship and encouragement help lift Zack’s vision of who he is deep within: not just an excellent rock guitarist but also a songwriter. In Zack’s case, as with all the students, Dewey follows what Campbell offers as the best teaching practice: “A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are—then to give advice, not commands” (The Power of Myth, 176). In short: Dewey Finn embodies the teacher archetype through inspiration, not domination. (For the opposite scenario, please read Lejla Panjeta’s MythBlast on Harry Potter’s Dolores Umbridge).
Redemption through rebellion
Although I won’t give any spoilers, of course you might guess that the trickster has a reckoning, as his intrusion into the deservedly-protected space of children is disturbing on one level (this brilliant trailer portraying the film as horror highlights its potentially dark underside). Suffice it to say that the overwhelmingly positive lessons that Dewey imparts are not for naught. His trickery ultimately serves a beneficial purpose, and he himself experiences an awakening to his own teacher archetype, hidden within, buried underneath his persona of slacker rock star. In fact, all the parties involved—Dewey, the students, their parents, and the school—receive an education along the lines of what Thomas Moore indicated in my opening quote: an emerging of hidden potential. And in the spirit of Moore’s use of the word enticing to make this happen, the trickster is just the right archetype to facilitate that blossoming. So, who knows? Perhaps my trickster-teacher enticed students to uncover and nurture in themselves what was once only a seed.
MythBlast authored by:
Scott Neumeister, PhD is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his PhD in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati.
This MythBlast was inspired by Myth & Meaning and the archetype of The Teacher.
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