The teachers we remember, and the teachers we imagine

Every Teachers' Day, we return to the teachers we remember.

We remember the ones who explained difficult chapters, corrected our grammar, returned our notebooks with red ink running across the margins. We remember the strict ones, the kind ones, the teachers whose classes we dreaded and those whose classes we waited for. Yet what we remember most often has surprisingly little to do with what they actually taught us to see.

The dates disappear. Definitions blur. The answers we once memorised for examinations become increasingly difficult to retrieve. What remains is something less measurable: the teacher who took our question seriously; the one who introduced us to a book that altered our understanding of the world; the one who disagreed with us without humiliating us; the one who made us realise that an authority figure could be questioned.

Perhaps this is why teachers occupy such a peculiar place in popular culture. We repeatedly create them, remember them and return to them in books, films and television—not merely as people who teach, but as figures through whom we imagine what education ought to be.

Our fictional teachers are rarely just teachers. They are embodiments of particular ideas about knowledge, authority, childhood, discipline, freedom and society.

One of the teachers I return to every Teachers' Day is Udayan Pandit in Satyajit Ray's Hirak Rajar Deshe. Udayan Pandit teaches in a kingdom where education has been reduced to an instrument of authoritarian power. The classroom is not a space for inquiry; it is a mechanism for producing obedience. Knowledge has become dangerous precisely because it can encourage people to question the world they have been asked to accept. Udayan's teaching therefore becomes an act of resistance. He does not merely teach his students information. He teaches them to recognise power—to understand that what is presented as truth may be ideology, and that authority is not necessarily entitled to obedience.

There is something profoundly radical about this conception of the teacher. Education, at its most meaningful, does not simply equip us to function within the world as it exists. It can also give us the vocabulary to question the structures that organise that world.

This is close to Paulo Freire's understanding of education as the development of critical consciousness: learning to read not only the word but the world. The teacher, in this conception, is not simply a transmitter of knowledge but a participant in the process through which students learn to understand—and potentially transform—their social reality.

Popular culture, however, does not give us only the rebellious teacher.

Consider Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter series.

McGonagall is hardly the image of the warm, permissive teacher. She is demanding, disciplined and often intimidating. She expects her students to work, to listen and to meet standards. Yet her authority is never merely about control. It rests on the conviction that her students are capable of more. More importantly, McGonagall reminds us that authority and legitimacy are not synonymous. She possesses authority because of her institutional position, but she does not treat institutional power as inherently worthy of obedience. When authority becomes arbitrary she is willing to resist it. Her significance lies partly in this distinction: a teacher can demand discipline without demanding submission.

This is an important distinction in how we imagine teachers. The good teacher need not necessarily be the student's friend. Nor does care always have to look like gentleness. Sometimes care takes the form of high expectations. Sometimes it means telling a student that they can do better precisely because we believe they are capable of doing so.

Ricky Braithwaite in To Sir, with Love offers another kind of teacher.

His students enter the classroom carrying the weight of social expectations. They have already been categorised—as difficult, unruly, academically unsuccessful. Braithwaite gradually refuses to see them only through these labels. He changes not merely what happens in his classroom but the relationship between teacher and student.

The film also reminds us that education does not take place outside society. Class, poverty, social expectations and cultural capital enter the classroom with the students.

Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital helps explain why educational institutions can reproduce inequality even when they claim simply to reward merit. Students arrive with different linguistic resources, habits, forms of knowledge and familiarity with the cultural codes valued by institutions. What is often presented as individual ability may therefore be entangled with social privilege.

Braithwaite's significance is that he refuses to allow social circumstance to become a verdict on intellectual potential.

His pedagogy begins with something deceptively simple: treating his students as people worthy of dignity.

Then there is John Keating in Dead Poets Society, perhaps one of cinema's most recognisable teachers.

What Keating teaches is not simply poetry. He changes his students' relationship to poetry. He makes literature feel urgent, intimate and alive. He turns the classroom from a place where students are expected to arrive at the correct interpretation into a space where they are encouraged to ask what a poem might mean to them—and why.

Some teachers give us knowledge. Others give us an appetite for knowledge.

For anyone who has studied literature, that distinction matters. The humanities are often asked to justify themselves in a language of utility: What job will this degree lead to? What measurable skill does literature provide? Keating offers a different answer.

The humanities teach us to interpret rather than merely consume, to remain with ambiguity rather than demand an immediate answer, and to encounter perspectives beyond our own. Literary study asks us to inhabit other consciousness, to encounter histories we did not inherit and to question assumptions that can otherwise pass unnoticed.

This is not merely an aesthetic exercise. Thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum have argued that humanities education contributes to democratic life by cultivating critical self-examination and what she calls the narrative imagination—the capacity to imagine the lives and circumstances of people whose experiences differ from our own.

For those who study English Literature, the subject is therefore never simply the study of language and books. Literature teaches us to ask who speaks and who remains silent; who is represented and who is absent; which stories become canonical and which are forgotten; how language constructs identities; how caste, class, gender, race and colonial histories shape representation. To read critically is also to learn to look critically. And sometimes critical attention begins with something as simple as noticing that the person in front of us does not fit the category we have assigned to them.

That is what Nikumbh Sir does in Taare Zameen Par. Everyone around Ishaan has already produced an explanation for him. He is lazy. He is careless. He is incapable. He is a problem that needs to be corrected. Nikumbh begins elsewhere: with attention. He asks what the child is experiencing rather than simply asking why the child cannot conform. The distinction is crucial. It moves education away from a deficit model and towards recognition. It asks whether the failure lies entirely within the student—or whether the institution has failed to understand the student. Sometimes teaching means refusing to accept the categories that have already been imposed upon a child.

These fictional teachers are radically different from one another. McGonagall represents principled authority. Braithwaite represents dignity across social difference. Keating represents intellectual and aesthetic freedom. Nikumbh represents attention and recognition. Udayan Pandit represents resistance.

And perhaps this explains why such teachers stay with us. They are cultural arguments about what a teacher might be. The rebellious teacher appears when we fear authoritarianism. The compassionate teacher appears when institutions become indifferent to individual difference. The inspiring teacher appears when education has become mechanical. The strict but principled teacher appears when discipline has been confused with domination.

Popular culture keeps returning to these figures because the question of what education should do remains unresolved. Should education produce disciplined citizens or questioning ones? Should a teacher transmit knowledge or facilitate discovery? Should the classroom reproduce the values of society or provide a space in which those values can be interrogated?

Perhaps the most interesting answer is that it should do all of these things—but never without reflection on the power involved. Because a teacher occupies a peculiar position in our lives.

A teacher is an adult who is not part of our family, yet becomes an extraordinary presence during the years in which we are becoming ourselves. We spend hours with teachers when our identities are still fluid, when our opinions are forming and when the boundaries of the world are still being negotiated.

This is also why teaching is an unsettling responsibility.

The classroom is not an ideologically neutral space. There is a distribution of power between the person standing at the front and those sitting before them. There are institutional expectations, inherited curricula, established canons and assumptions about what constitutes intelligence, discipline and success.

Teachers can reproduce these structures. They can also disrupt them.

Perhaps the teachers who matter most are those who understand that their authority is temporary, and that their ultimate responsibility is not to produce students who think like them but students who can think for themselves.

This is the paradox at the heart of good teaching: its success lies partly in making the teacher unnecessary.

And perhaps that is why the teachers in popular culture matter even to those of us who have long since left the classroom. They give us images for qualities that are difficult to name in the teachers we have known: courage, discipline, resistance, curiosity, compassion, imagination.

Most of us will never have a Udayan Pandit, a McGonagall, a Braithwaite, a Keating or a Nikumbh Sir exactly as popular culture has imagined them.

But perhaps we have encountered fragments of each.

A teacher who taught us to question, notice, and imagine.

A teacher who taught us that authority can be challenged.

A teacher who made us believe that our difficulties did not define our abilities.

A teacher who made us fall in love with a subject we had once thought we would never understand.

We often say that teachers shape the future. Perhaps that is too grand a claim. Perhaps their more immediate power is that they shape the people who will inhabit that future.

And that may be why, long after we have forgotten the chapter they taught or the examination they helped us pass, we remember the teacher.

Not necessarily for what they taught us.

But for the way they taught us to see.