Miss Brody: toxic teacher

 TeaAtTrianon has a review of Maggie Smith's iconic role playing the teacher in the film The Prime of Miss Brody.

The influence, for good or ill, of a charismatic teacher can never be underestimated. Such is the theme of the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, starring Maggie Smith, who flourishes in every direction as the schoolmarm with the double life...

The film focuses on how certain girls are adversely affected by being brought into Jean Brodie's inner circle. Mary MacGregor is inspired by Miss Brodie's love of Franco to run off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, only to be killed. Jean tries to groom Jenny into taking her place in Mr. Lloyd's bed but it is Sandy, plain and practical, who ends up being his mistress...

Italics mine.

Groomed is a good word for it: so yes teachers can insert their opinions into teaching. Inspiring enthusiasm for the arts, or for science, or for religion/ethics/good deeds is good, but with teenage girls, some are easily over influenced by the crowd, and to make things worse is when there is often an in-crowd that echoes the teacher's/social media influencer's toxic ideas, both political and sexual, so girls wanting to be popular will chose to blindly follow them.

In other words, Miss Brody grooms some of the girls and some of them blindly follow her ideas, just like cults influence people by love bombing: if you follow me, you can have my approval.

If this doesn't sound like it might have lessons for today, then I ask you to watch some teachers on tictoc who brag about pushing their transgender agenda on kids. 

Is this worse than a teacher pushing their religion onto the kids? Or inoculating kids with patriotism?

 Depends. 

I sent my kids to religious schools, so I did expect them to be taught Christianity as long as they didn't overdo it and turn them into blank eyed zombies. 

But the religious influence did help shape their lives. So my youngest did spend a year in Kentucky repairing houses for a charity group there. Just like I spent a couple years in Africa after finishing my medical training, But it wasn't from cultlike belief, but from the inner core of our soul, to chose good over selfishness.

And that is the problem of Miss Brody: She enjoys the power to mold the girls into her image, instead of encouraging their intellectual maturity by teaching love of the good and beautiful.

discuss class

But it's been awhile since I saw the film, but right now our family tv time has decided to do a Maggie Smith marathon (last night was My House in Umbria, but I do have The Prime of Miss Brody on that list).

....

After Reading the review of the film, I think I might want to read the book. Luckily for me, the audiobook is also on Youtube: