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“Because you're all minorities. You’re in the Glee Club.”
Glee's Mr. Schue is framed as the prototypical 'teacher who cares' —
but if we look at his behavior, he's actually not the best person
to be molding impressionable young minds.
“La Cucaracha!”
Mr. Schue frequently oversteps the boundary of teacher-student relations,
showing dangerously poor judgment as an educator.
“So I planted the pot in your locker
and blackmailed you into joining the Glee Club.”
He uses the Glee Club to relive his own high-school glory days,
favors the white kids, and makes everything about him.
“What happened to you guys?
Openly defying me?
Unique, you need to tone it down with the whole boob thing.”
His behavior is sometimes so wildly inappropriate that the show’s
supposed “villain” and Mr. Schue’s number one critic,
cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, can come across as the voice of reason.
So when it came to Mr. Schue’s bad choices,
what weird messages did Glee ultimately send about what it means
to be a good teacher?
Here’s our Take on why Will Schuester is actually the “bad teacher” of Glee.
“Did you know there’s a forum on my blog begging you to stop rapping?”
“Wait, kids don’t like it when I rap?”
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“Do you plan on having children?
Or just continue to have weirdly intimate relationships with high school
students instead of children?”
Even from the show’s pilot,
there are signs that Mr. Schue is kind of creepy.
He thinks it’s completely okay to watch a student take a shower just
because he admires his undiscovered singing talent.
A lot of what Mr. Schue understands as being “one with the youth” feels
totally inappropriate by today’s standards, regularly crossing over what
most would consider healthy boundaries
of how teachers should act with their students.
“Twerking is about blurring the lines between the past and the present,
between men and women,
between tradition and envelope pushing.”
When Rachel Berry develops a small crush on Mr. Schue
in season one, he believes that the best response is
to perform a mashup of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”
and “Young Girl”.
The pretty raunchy lyrics refer to an older figure wanting to get closer
to a younger girl, despite knowing it’s wrong.
Noteworthy lines include
“Temptation frustration, so bad it makes him cry,
beneath your perfume and makeup you’re just a baby in disguise.”
His questionable decision-making is also not a one-off problem.
He allows two of his teenage students
to join his personal acapella group of older adults,
which leads to a situation where the teens perform sexually charged
songs with their teachers.
“Girl, you make me feel real good.”
In the Britney Spears tribute episode,
he initially rejects the idea of performing Britney’s songs as too
“adult” for the students, only to end up performing “Toxic”
onstage alongside his students, complete with provocative dance moves.
The performance not only arouses multiple students,
but also encourages some students to direct sexual feelings towards him.
“Mr. Schue, let me be your Britney!”
The “moral panic” reaction at the end of the episode
(and Mr. Schue learning his “lesson” that they’re not going to perform
any more Britney) is arguably misguided by today’s values.
The episode follows how the students feel empowered by Spears’s music
because it allows them to confidently express their sensuality —
which helps them to navigate their personal relationships
with more self-assurance and open communication.
But there’s something clearly unnerving about an adult teacher joining in
and expressing his sexuality with his students,
gyrating next to heavy-breathing teens.
Moreover,
Will’s motivation isn’t really what’s good for the kids —
he just wanted to do a sexy dance to impress his love interest, Emma.
“Because the boring someone I already am wasn't good enough for you.”
After the chaos that follows,
Schue claims that he understands the errors of his ways,
“It was inappropriate for me to do Britney with the kids.”
and we’re invited to see Schue as a brilliant Britney-type himself
through this somewhat confusing analogy:
“She can't just swallow a grenade
and let her talent explode all over the wall.
She's gotta rein it in, just like you do.”
But three episodes later, he chooses even more sexually charged material,
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
It’s another selection some could hail as boundary-pushing in a positive,
liberating sense,
except again he only does it to get closer to Emma.
“I only did all this to get close to you.”
He casts himself as Rocky
(stealing the role from a student) so he can practice the “Touch Me”
number with his crush (even though this means he’ll
eventually perform this wildly sexual number with a student!)
And the musical sequence of “Touch Me”
with Brittany and Santana watching them, features a series of disorienting
dissolves between shots of Will and his students
all standing over Emma, who’s lying on her back —
making us feel just how blurred the boundaries are between Will’s
and his student’s intimate lives.
In the fifth season,
he leads a rendition of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” — a song that had
already been widely deemed problematic for promoting rape culture —
while his students twerk around him.
In yet another example of poor boundaries,
Mr. Schue allows his former classmate April, a struggling addict
with a disturbing interest in high school boys,
to enroll in Glee Club, even after his students and
co-workers express concern.
April arrives drunk to performances and even gives alcohol to students,
but Mr. Schue allows her to go on stage while intoxicated because he puts
the club’s success above individuals’ well-being.
“You can’t let her go on in her condition.”
“There’s an auditorium full of people waiting to see us perform.”
In another incident, when one student expresses her
discomfort about a risqué outfit, not only does Mr. Schue punish her
for refusing to wear it, but he guilts her into thinking
that her unease is an attack on the entire Glee Club.
“What happened to the seashell bikini?” “I was uncomfortable.”
“Marley, we’re all trying to win a championship here, as a team,
but you put your personal agenda above that.
I’m sorry,
but you’re suspended for the rest of the week.”
It’s relatable, honest storytelling that Will sometimes stumbles because
he’s a human being and his role as a teacher isn’t his whole identity,
but it’s also odd that someone who can’t separate his responsibilities
as an educator from his personal desires and impulses is framed as such
a “wonderful teacher”.
“You're such a great teacher, Will.
No. Probably the best in the whole school.”
Will makes a lot of his bad decisions
in order to impress a girl, which leads us into the observation
that he can be pretty toxic in his romantic relationships, too.
The first season frames Will’s partner Terri in a very critical
(if not misogynistic) light, her major sin being “trapping” him
by pretending to be pregnant after she learns she’s having a
“hysterical pregnancy”.
Her deceit is undoubtedly shocking and upsetting,
but Will’s reaction here is aggressive, almost violent,
as he villainizes her and refuses
to listen to her about the false pregnancy that drove her behavior.
“It didn’t start as a lie. I really thought I was pregnant.”
If we do listen,
we can also catch fragments that explain how she was acting out
of insecurity because (like so much of Will’s life)
their relationship is based on looking back to his high-school glory days
instead of him attending to the real person in front of him.
“You love the girl you met when you were 15,
I’m not that girl.”
When his main love interest,
and later wife, Emma Pillsbury, starts dating Carl, it becomes evident
that he’s helping her overcome a lot of the triggers of her OCD.
But Will takes it upon himself to sabotage their relationship and
try to win her back at the expense of Emma’s mental wellbeing.
“The sandwich. The dirty theater.
He’s actually making her better. He’s winning!”
When Emma ends things with Carl, she regresses back to old habits —
which Will encourages.
“I love how you eat your lunch with your little plastic gloves and
they crinkle and make the cutest sound I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Okay, so Mr. Schue has some big red flags in his personal life and his
career as an educator, but what this underscores is
how valuable and rare a truly great teacher is.
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The Teacher Who Cares is a beacon of motivation for the angsty,
struggling student with untapped potential, swooping in to
change students’ lives forever.
“You listen to me!
These kids have worked their little fingers to the bone just to play one
song for you so you just sit down, shut up and listen!”
Despite some iconic and beloved examples in cinema like Dead Poets’ Society’s
Mr. Keating, it’s a trope with clear limitations.
Community’s Professor Whitman is a parody of this trope,
hyperinflating its DNA to reveal how performative these teachers can be.
“The motto of this class is carpe diem: seize the day!
No tests, no papers.”
The Teacher who Cares is looking for a sense of purpose and more explosive
sense of “meaning” from their job than is actually realistic —
and they put pressure on students
to perform how deeply their teacher has transformed them.
Mr. Schue falls into a lot of this trope's pitfalls.
A chronic narrative theme within Glee is that Mr. Schue lives vicariously
through his students as he tries to relive his days of his
high-school Glee Club.
The feeling that he uses Glee Club to fill a void in his adult life is
exacerbated when Will becomes bored of his job after the glee kids
win the national championship,
and he’s finally achieved his teen dream.
“I’m so bored. What is wrong with me?
This is what I’ve always wanted. I won Nationals.”
All this isn’t to say that the glee kids don’t matter to him,
but that his “altruistic” framing
is false, because a huge driver for Mr. Schue is self-fulfillment.
Mr. Schue, and Teachers who Care in general,
can border on narcissistic —
more preoccupied with their magical ability to inspire through dramatic
moments and earth-shattering revelations, than with truly providing
students with a good education, a process that requires consistent
attention to monotonous, sometimes boring, details.
“You were too busy chasing your bizarre childhood dream of a
Glee Club national championship.
And now that that’s over, well, you’re waking up to the incessant,
mind-numbing tedium that is the day-to-day life of a school teacher.”
Will’s self-involved view of “his” Glee Club is also apparent in his
tendency to reject his students’ suggestions.
“What songs would you like to do?
Oh, don’t get asked that question much, do we?”
He tries to make the Glee Club into a nostalgic mold of the one he remembers
or always longed for,
and his setlists are full of songs that he wants to personally perform.
“Mr. Schue, can we do that new Cee-Lo song ‘Forget You’?”
“Uh no. Come on guys,
there’s got to be a Journey song we haven’t done yet.”
He also regularly chooses to give the spotlight to his white students.
Although it’s never made apparent that Schue is doing this consciously
from a place of racism, his choices ultimately lead to
POC characters feeling disrespected.
“Everyone knows that Rachel is your favorite.
You give that skinny, Garanimal-wearing, ass-kisser everything.”
Throughout the first season,
Matt Rutherford, a Black member of the Glee Club,
never has any solos or even speaking lines.
His nature as the ultimate background character eventually becomes a point
of satire that the series uses to awkwardly criticize itself.
“Or the Black dancer whose name none of us remember because
you rode his back to winning sectionals and then promptly
ignored him into oblivion.”
Mr. Schue’s mishandling of racial differences is uncomfortably clear
in his Spanish classes, where he covers over his poor grasp
of the actual subject that he’s supposed to be primarily teaching,
by relying on stereotypes.
When Santana, who is Latina, criticizes his Mariachi performance
for being offensive,
Schue’s tone-deafness points to his overall ignorance.
“You don’t even know enough to be embarrassed about these
stereotypes that you’re perpetuating.”
It’s this (sometimes willful) ignorance that makes Mr. Schue think
it’s okay to invade his student’s privacy, perform songs about sex with
them and in front of them, dictate his partner’s behavior,
and be racially insensitive.
There is one character who is always quick to call Will on his
damaging behavior.
So is it time to revisit if she ever had a point?
“Will Schuester is a weepy man-child
whose greatest joy in life is singing with children.
And his best friend? 19.”
The set-up of Sue as Will’s rival and polar opposite makes sense —
she’s the sports mindset to his arts one,
a more “conservative, family values” pushback to his liberal,
self-expression, champion of the “cool kids” versus
the “creative underdogs”.
Her villainous disdain for the Glee Club and dirty antics to sabotage
it are comic relief and plot obstacles, but they’re also an interesting
contrast to the way she, in practice, actually empowers many of her students.
“Yeah, well, Madonna is a legend.
I want my girls to learn all the lessons she has to offer.
Strength. Independence,”
And despite her surface absurdities and crassness, her criticisms of Mr. Schue
sometimes sound strikingly reasonable.
She repeatedly confronts Mr. Schue about all of the lines he’s crossing,
and the importance of boundaries
when it comes to the students’ artistic expression and sexualized content.
“There are limits, Will. There is a line.
And for reasons I suspect have nothing to do with your kids,
you crossed it.”
After the “Blurred Lines'' incident,
Sue not only highlights the song’s problematic nature,
“You do realized Blurred Lines is a song about date rape,
don’t you?”
but also the harmful message that Mr. Schue sends by taking
part in the performance.
“You, a married 37-year-old, just performed a song about
coercive sexual advances, as nine minors twerked alongside you,
down the hallways of a public high school.”
She also schools him on his treatment of disabled students when he
inadvertently ostracizes Becky, a student with Down syndrome,
by treating her differently than her classmates.
“She's not like everybody else.”
“I want you to listen to what you just said William …
it seems to me she just wants to be treated like everybody else.”
In the final season,
we see Sue delivering a fierce monologue that dictates every way
in which Will has messed up
as a teacher, from his favoritism within
the Glee Club to his incompetence as a Spanish teacher.
“You have befouled the profession of teaching by accepting
not only one, but two Teacher of the Year Awards,
despite not speaking a word of the foreign language you
purport to teach.”
Her brutal lecture is indicative of the writers’ awareness of how
Will has fallen short, while Sue
(who consistently outperforms our expectations)
has evolved into a nuanced antihero.
Moreover, her role as a third-party perspective calling out the
self-important absurdity of Mr. Schue’s Glee Club drama is vital
to the narrative’s digestibility.
Isobel Lewis, writer for The Guardian, states that “the self-referential jokes
and witty one-liners, mostly from[...] Sue Sylvester,
made the bizarre storylines easier to swallow, and a cast
of arguably unlikable characters easier to root for.”
Without Sue, all we’d have is a cast of characters that think it’s okay to
perform the “Cell Block Tango” as domestic violence awareness.
“While completely missing the point about absolutely everything.”
It’s going too far to call Sue any kind of model teacher —
she does questionable things, and bullies the students.
But she’s an illuminating mirror of what Mr. Schue lacks,
underlining that some of the most important things a teacher does can be
counterintuitive, hard and unglamorous.
Despite all this evidence that he’s far from an ideal teacher,
Mr. Schue undeniably inspires many students.
“No matter how depressed you get, no matter how hopeless or
alone you feel,
try your best to imagine all the amazing experiences you have
ahead of you.”
He does his best to help them with their problems when
they have no one else, connects to them as equals,
and introduces the power of artistic expression as a
means of self-discovery.
As much as the show does see and call out his mistakes,
it ultimately believes in how much talented, generous creative types
have to give, even when they get a lot wrong.
And, together with all the other teachers on Glee,
Mr. Schue reminds us just how huge a responsibility and gift
being a teacher is —
it’s a power like no other to guide young people’s paths toward
figuring out who they want (and don’t want) to be.
“Being part of something special does not make you special.
Something is special because you are a part of it.
Mr. Schue, I love you, ”
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