“I Just Love Kids . . . Is That a Problem?”: Desire, Suspicion, and Other Good Reasons Men Don’t Choose Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This essay is a critical response to the ubiquitous call for "more men in elementary education." The need for more male teachers in elementary grades classrooms is based on a belief that resides uneasily within a tight fist of related wisdom, contradictory understandings, and buried prejudices. The persistent call to teach occludes the culture's systematic rejection of men for the same job. In order to better understand the value/rejection associated with the mixed message, we examine several perspectives that may influence men in their decisions to reject the call to teach young students. One framework is that of desire or want of teaching and teachers. Another perspective is teaching in early grades construed as gendered women's work, policed by sexist and pedophilic bullying. In contrast, we offer cultural pedophilia, or child-loving practices that are recovered from popular culture. Women's desire is examined for ways it is instantiated into desexualized, everyday teaching practice, and the constitutive knot of mothering and early teaching is loosened. Finally, we offer the obverse, "the sexy teacher," not as a palliative, but as the necessary, logical counterpoint for a mirrored image of what we theorize are the everyday psychological transactions in acts of teaching. We suggest a revisioning of whom we desire as our children's teachers.