Idealism of Teachers

Great books, it has been said, are those you can return to over and over again, each time discovering compelling new ideas or details.

The Great Gatsby is one of those books, and for this reason, I believe, it remains popular in ELA curriculums throughout the country.  The themes that captivate students — idealism and self-invention — also appeal to teachers. 

Teachers, after all, are idealistic by nature.  We believe that all students can learn; we believe that learning is an affirmation of self-worth; we believe that education is an essential component of growth; we believe education can be a vehicle for change; and, we believe education is at the heart of a democratic society.  We believe, furthermore, in the absolutism of these ideals.

The themes of idealism and self-invention intersect in The Great Gatsby at the point in the story when we are told that “Gatsby sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” meriting an introduction to the concept of Platonic dualism in my classes, especially the differentiation between the realms of forms and ideals as they relate to time.  I point out that the references to dust and ashes throughout the novel obviously highlight the ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust material world.  Myrtle’s YOLO attitude –“you can’t live forever” — relegates her firmly to a temporal existence, and students always have much to say about how this acronym reflects much of modern culture.

On the other hand, Gatsby’s famous “can’t repeat the past? of course you can” points to the realm of ideals which exists outside of time.  His unwavering loyalty to that Platonic vision of the wealthy man he would become accounts for the word “great” in the novel’s title.  Nevertheless, by the time we finish the novel, students discover that Gatsby’s Platonic identity is flawed, defiled by its association with the currency of the temporary realm of forms, the fallen, corruptible world.

Many of my students are the same age, seventeen, at which James Gatz began to conceptualize his future self as Jay Gatsby, and they too dream of wealth. It is a dream, unfortunately, that we all too often reinforce in our classrooms, encouraging our young people, our seventeen-year-olds, arguably the most hopeful segment of our population, to measure their self-worth and their achievements, by their salaries and their test scores.   

My students’ hopefulness is evident in their reluctance to consider the complexities of Gatsby’s relationship with Daisy. “Rich girls don’t marry poor boys,” seems absurd to them, especially given that Gatsby and Daisy loved each other when they first met.   We discuss what idealized love might mean, and then I ask students to brainstorm a list of other ideals, anticipating that they will refer to two of the words they repeat each morning in the pledge of allegiance to the flag, “liberty” and “justice.”  “Freedom” and “equality” and “duty” and “honor” always quickly follow.

At the end of the novel, the very obvious allusion to the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin recalls, of course, the American idealism associated with the founding of our country.  When we read the excerpt in which Franklin states his objective, to seek moral perfection, students tend to find the idea preposterous and even arrogant.  Reminding them of the grammatical quandary suggested by the use of the absolute adjective, “perfect,” with the qualifier “more” in our Constitution’s objective, “in order to form a more perfect union” always leads to wonderful discussion. To what extent was our Constitution a document of self-invention? Was the goal of a “more perfect union” arrogant or, to use a word that Nick uses to describe Gatsby, “gorgeous”?  Does Gatsby’s individual, materialistic dream represent the shift away from the original collective American Dream of the Constitution?

Another “essential question” emerges:  what will be the consequences of an America no longer unified by its original ideals, but by consumerism?

The answer to that question occurred in 2016.  The parallels between Tom Buchanan and Donald Trump became obvious, and I began to reflect more about the characters, Daisy and Myrtle especially, who were willing to be led by Tom, despite his despicable nature. 

Tom Buchanan is a womanizer who unlike the narrator, Nick Carraway, and the title character, Jay Gatsby, did not participate in “that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War,” instead seeking “a little wistfully” some thrill to combat the anti-climatic nature of a post-Yale football career.  Despite his Ivy League education, Tom Buchanan relies on lowbrow diction, as in his assessment of Goddard’s book, The Rise of the Colored Empires:  “It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”  A critical and inimical component of Buchanan’s characterization is his defense of the superiority of the “Nordic race” (which, presumably, includes people from Norway, which is not a “shithole” country, as Trump has noted). Tom Buchanan physically pushes people to get them to do what he wants.  In the first chapter Tom physically “compelled [Nick] from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square,” not unlike Trump pushing aside a delegate at the NATO Summit to get to the front of the group (the delegate, by the way, was the Prime Minister of “little” Montenegro).

Tom is diametrically opposed to Gatsby, the character who represents the “extraordinary gift for hope,” and in fact becomes hell-bent to see Gatsby destroyed. 

Eventually Nick sees past his initial allure to the world of the Tom Buchanans and calls Tom, Daisy and Jordan a “rotten crowd,” the word “rotten” associated with the material world, subject to decay.  At the end of the novel Nick decides to hightail it back to the Midwest, away from the moral corruption he encountered in the East, the corruption produced by materialism and consumerism, the “dust” of “industrialization,” back to America’s heartland, the place which implies the continuing respect for timeless values like hope.

Daisy stays with Tom, having discovered that when things get tough (in her case, being responsible for a fatal hit-and-run car accident), remaining loyal to a man who is “revolting” can be useful.  She and Tom sit at the kitchen table after the car accident that kills Myrtle, looking as though they “were conspiring together” (Fitzgerald, perhaps, could have used the word “colluding”). Tom Buchanan insidiously leads George Wilson to a double murder  –Gatsby’s and Wilson’s suicide — by convincing him that he was being helpful in identifying the yellow car as Gatsby’s.  Wilson, who is literally from “the other side of the tracks,” covered with dust, is easily led because he identifies himself as “one of these trusting fellas.”  Wilson, as the owner of a garage and gas station, may serve as the prototype for those contemporary Americans who trust that the revitalization of refineries, coal mines, and the automobile industry will save America.  Misleading Wilson allowed Tom Buchanan to kill several birds with one stone, without throwing anything himself.

Trust and loyalty are other key ideas developed throughout the novel. Students often pose an essential question of their own when we discuss which characters exhibit loyalty and which do not:  “Why did Myrtle stay with Tom even after he hit her and broke her nose?”   

Why is Trump so confident that he could stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue and shoot someone and not lose voters?

Tom moves unanchored along the timeline of the world of shadows.  He represents the “foul dust” that preyed on Gatsby.  He is the careless and destructive power presiding over the corruptible world.   

So too, ultimately and ironically Trump represents the absence of idealism, an absence which prevents America from being great.   He identifies himself as a “fixer,” someone who is limited to horizontal movement on a timeline, someone who is obsessed with the flawed world.  He possesses none of the virtues such as a love of wisdom, altruism, or steadiness, that Plato associates with ideal leadership.

Greatness can be realized only in the realm of ideals, by those engaged in the struggle to achieve the ideals defined by our founding forbearers, by those who are driven by ceaseless hope. 

It is not overstatement to suggest that preserving the idealism in our educational institutions is critical to preserving the ideals that define our democracy:  liberty, justice, equality.

Certainly, educators have a responsibility to teach practical skills, but we must be careful not to allow our ideals to be corrupted by the promise of lucrative careers in exchange for very specialized studies.  Educators cannot and should not promise jobs to students; what we can promise is that learning in and of itself is good.  The content in our curriculum is secondary to the fact that the more we learn, the more capable we are of learning.  It should not be our goal to classify students based on their earning potential; rather, it is our obligation to encourage students to understand that being open to different learning opportunities is not only a positive character trait, but a democratic responsibility. Students who learn to value learning will be better employees, entrepreneurs and citizens.  Just as Benjamin Franklin sought moral perfection in himself and a “more perfect union” for our country, our educational system, and teachers individually, are greatest when we demonstrate a commitment to these ideals, even while we go about our mundane business.

Modeling a commitment to ideals, both democratic and educational, is the best method to inspire “romantic readiness” in our students, an optimistic, forward-looking approach to their individual lives and the collective greatness of our country; however, we have much work to do.  Too many of our students have learned to judge their worth by their standardized test scores and plan their future careers based on the highest salary potentials, not on what they have discovered about themselves while in our classroom. They associate power with materialism. They identify money with hope. They misread business acumen as wisdom.  They are motivated by fear, not joy, not desire. 

We cannot allow our classrooms to be spaces that limit our students to asking why.  Instead, we must encourage our students, in the words of Robert Kennedy, to “dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

At the end of the novel Nick Carraway refuses to shake Tom’s hand. I ask students to write about whether or not they think Nick’s refusal was appropriate. 

After one student admitted that he was having trouble deciding, I advised him to write down all his thoughts, to record his reflection process.

“But which side will get me a better grade?” he asked.

So I beat on.