Teachers as Self-Actualized Individuals

bell hooks observes the opposition between academics and “being well.” She writes that academics are often idealized as emotionally dysfunctional people, whose intellectual gifts distract them from their misery and also serve as an excuse for their emotional impairment. I was surprised to read that many of hooks’s students, aspiring academics themselves, expressed worry of becoming such dysfunctional people in pursuit of their academic goals. While I’m unfamiliar with the pervasiveness of personal and emotional dysfunction within the academic realm, I think that our current impersonal model of education, in which teachers are seen as authoritative figures disconnected from their personal lives, in which emotional investment and confession is occasionally expected of students but never expected of teachers, contributes to this culture of academic success at the expense of emotional well-being.