Hey, teacher! Leave those kids alone!: 26 evil, awful, or just plain stupid educators in TV and film

1.
Principal Vernon in The Breakfast Club

The
Breakfast Club
wasn't content to narrow just the students down to broad stereotypes: In
addition to the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, and the
criminal, there's Principal Richard "Dick" Vernon, the frustrated ex-jock. He
can't stand looking bad in front of the students, and "criminal" Judd Nelson
pushes all of his pro-authority buttons. He even tries to provoke Nelson into
punching him—after locking him in a utility closet and threatening to
find him and kick his ass, of course.

2.
Olivier Castro-Staal in Six Feet Under

Throughout Six Feet Under,
Claire Fisher is forever in pursuit of the "life of an artist"— exactly
the kind of naïve, ill-defined goal that makes her easy prey for the likes of
Olivier Castro-Staal, professor of the equally vague "Form And Space" class she
enrolls in at LAC-Arts. With his open contempt for authority and penchant for
grand declarations like "An artist never questions her right to experience
everything the world has to offer," Olivier charms Claire into becoming his
assistant by promising to introduce her to a world of exciting nonconformity
and visceral experience. Which is nothing compared to the seductive trip he
lays on her boyfriend Russell, whom he screws while Claire is out running one
of his selfish, degrading errands. Over time, both Claire and Russell start to
see Olivier for who he really is: an arrogant, self-pitying child who never
quite got over not becoming a famous artist, and who regularly takes it out on
his students. And although he (slightly) redeems himself by recommending Claire
for a job, his true feelings are revealed when he tells her, "You were my
student and my assistant. Now we're competition."

3-6. Mrs. Krabappel, Miss Hoover, Principal
Skinner, and Superintendent Chalmers in The Simpsons

While Principal Skinner periodically leaps
Sisyphean hurdles to keep Springfield Elementary going, the entire staff
deserves some blame for the school's condition, as a shameful place where low
test scores (and row after row of ugly, ugly children) abound, the few
intelligent students are openly resented and frequently exploited, and kids are
only inspired when they're serving as free test-marketers for a toy company. Of
course, it's all too easy to point fingers at the teachers themselves: Edna
Krabappel and Elizabeth Hoover are both pictures of institutionalized apathy,
worn down by lack of funds, far past pretending to take interest in their
students' performance (and in Miss Hoover's case, annoyed with those who
excel), and primarily interested in sneaking cigarettes in the teachers'
lounge. But as with any bureaucracy, incompetence trickles down from on high,
and the worst of all might just be Superintendent Chalmers, whose intense
dislike of disorder serves as a mask for his own considerable detachment:
Surveying the anarchy of Ned Flanders' brief, chaotic reign as principal,
Chalmers shrugs, "The way America's public schools are sliding, they'll all be
this way in a few months. I say lay back and enjoy it! It's a hell of a
toboggan ride!"

7-8.
Principal Togar in Rock 'N' Roll High School/Vice Principal Vadar in Rock 'N' Roll High School Forever

Pity
the principal that goes up against the forces of rock 'n' roll—whether
those forces come in the form of the Ramones or, um, Corey Feldman's band The
Eradicators. In Rock 'N' Roll High School, über-strict Principal Evelyn Togar calls
the police on the rockin' students of Vince Lombardi High, and even takes away
their ringleader's Ramones tickets. The students' response? Stage a Ramones
concert on the school lawn, then blow up the school. By Rock 'N' Roll High
School Forever,
Principal Togar has increased her strength (and insanity) tenfold. She's now
Vice Principal Vadar, and she rules with an iron fist—literally: She has
a prosthetic metal hand (and a prosthetic whip hand) that she uses to
intimidate the rockers at Ronald Reagan High. But rock (and Corey Feldman) will
not be stopped: In the end, the school gets blown up again.

9.
Vic Racine on My So-Called Life

Mr. Racine, Angela Chase's substitute English
teacher, wore clashing socks, chomped on toothpicks, hosted classroom writing
sessions by candlelight, insisted his students call him "Vic," and encouraged
them to write with honesty, even if that honesty lead to poetry with phrases
like, "he tastes my juicy sweetness." In short, he was a cool teacher—not
to mention an inspirational one. He even figured out that Jordan Catalano
looked so dopey not because his choker was too tight, but because he didn't
know how to read. Still, it's easier to teach honesty than to practice it.
Turns out "Vic Racine" was an alias, and the inspirational substitute teacher
had abandoned his family, and was wanted for back payment of child support.
Still, Mr. Racine was an effective teacher in that he taught Angela that heroes
aren't perfect, and to never, ever trust anyone who obsessively chews
toothpicks.

10. Everyone in The Faculty

Strict teachers and principals like Bebe Neuwirth
in The Faculty
can be such jerks, especially when they've been infected by an alien parasite
that's taken over their brains, and they're sending all of the students for
mandatory health inspections so the school nurse (Salma Hayek) can slip alien
parasites into their ears. Luckily, there's a way to combat such jerky,
alien-infected high-school faculty members: drugs—specifically, Bic pens
full of cocaine. Thus The Faculty is the only movie where openly dealing drugs in
high school will get the faculty off your back.

11. Mr. Hand in Fast Times At Ridgemont High

Mr. Hand at least turns out to be interested in
his students' welfare by the end of Fast Times At Ridgemont High, but he's still a
hard-ass largely for the sake of being a hard-ass, and he seems more interested
in establishing his dominance than actually teaching: When Sean Penn shows up
late to class on the first day, Mr. Hand (played by Ray Walston), tears up his
schedule card and sends him to his office. Mr. Hand also looks down on all of
his students, assuming they're on dope. (Granted, they probably are.)

12.
Michel Delassalle in Diabolique

Usually,
European boarding schools are associated with the finest a continental
education can offer. Not so with the run-down, crumbling school run by
headmaster Michel Delassalle (played with maximum oiliness by Paul Meurisse) in
Henri-Georges Clouzot's suspense classic Diabolique. The grounds are in ill
repair, the professors—like the perfectly named Mssr. Drain—are
incompetents and time-servers, the kids smoke and harass the staff, and
Delassalle himself is a monster who mistreats his wife and openly carries on an
affair. Even the two women who are supposed to love him are plotting his
demise. He's such an uncaring administrator that the school seemingly would
only get better if he disappeared, but in fact, it gets much, much worse.

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13.
Principal Strickland in Back To The Future

Ageless
authoritarian Mr. Strickland rules the hallways of Hill Valley High with a
strict military precision that perfectly matches his bullish bald head. But
while there's nothing wrong with maintaining discipline—especially in a
school where bullies like Biff Tannen roam free—it's Strickland's
oft-stated disdain for "slackers" that earns him a place on this list, a
lifelong prejudice that manifests in statements like, "No McFly has ever
amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley." For Strickland, fostering
young minds obviously runs a distant second to instilling them with fear and
crushing their dreams—although to be fair, Back To The Future's grand statement ('The
future is what you make of it") and Strickland's admonition to not be such a
loser are pretty much one and the same.

14. Mr./Mrs. Garrison in South Park

Given the emphasis that South Park has put on Mr. Garrison's
personal life over the last few years—his coming out of the closet, his
home life with Mr. Slave, his multiple sex changes—it's easy to forget
his early days on the show, when his sole purpose was to be the world's
craziest, most thoroughly incompetent teacher. In his early days, he patronized
his third-grade class by teaching through a hand puppet named Mr. Hat, who was
racist, gay, and insulting to the students. ("Mr. Hat, may I please be excused
from class?""Well, Kyle, no! You hear
me? You go to hell! You go to hell and you die!") When Mr. Hat disappeared,
apparently off on his own adventures, Mr. Garrison briefly replaced him with a
tree branch named Mr. Twig, but eventually, he learned to stop hiding behind a
puppet and express his many sexual kinks, his racism, his profound ignorance,
and his hatred for his students openly, abusing them and encouraging them to
abuse each other. At least, when he wasn't replacing the school curriculum with
his own lessons on pop culture, like how many times Charo appeared on The
Love Boat,
or why, um, Chubby Checker left The Beatles.

15. Principal Snyder on Buffy The Vampire Slayer

It ain't easy running a school, and Principal
Snyder has it harder than most, having to take over Sunnydale High from a man
who was literally eaten alive by his own students. Still, that doesn't explain
the intense pleasure Snyder gets from being a bully, his "tingle" of glee at
making life miserable for Buffy, Giles, and the rest of the Scooby Gang, nor
his obvious favoritism for athletes and unabashed hatred for everyone else.
(Perhaps his philosophy is best summed up by a line in "School Hard": "A lot of
educators tell students, 'Think of your principal as your pal.' I say, 'Think
of me as your judge, jury, and executioner.'") Even more troubling, Snyder's
reign comes at the behest of evil Mayor Richard Wilkins, who specifically
appointed Snyder to the job so he could cover up the school's frequent
supernatural activity, dismissing it as the acts of gangs on PCP. With nary a
redemptive moment, Snyder is second only to the Big Bad in the ranks of Buffy's
nemeses; speaking for everyone onscreen and at home, Xander later dreams of
telling Snyder, "I never got the chance to tell you how glad I was you were
eaten by a snake."

16. Mr. Jonas in How Green Was My Valley

A sentimental but still pretty dark adaptation of
Richard Llewellyn's novel about growing up poor and Welsh at the end of the
Victorian Era, John Ford's How Green Was My Valley stars young Roddy
McDowall as Huw (pronounced "Hugh") Morgan, a kid whose scholastic abilities
might be his ticket out of his dead-end mining town. Ford's film rhapsodizes
over village life without skipping any of the hardships, including the outside
prejudice McDowall encounters when he earns the right to leave the village to
go to school. There, a sadistic, foppish teacher (Morton Lowry) berates him for
being poor, when not caning him to the bone. But Lowry's reign of terror ends
when a pair of villagers, including a local prizefighter, beat Lowry up in his
classroom under the guise of administering a "boxing lesson," thus fulfilling
an unspoken fantasy of school-kids everywhere.

17. Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films

Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft And Wizardry has
employed its share of questionably qualified professors throughout the Harry
Potter
series, including addled Divination instructor Sybill Trelawny (played by Emma
Thompson in the films), vapid pretty-boy Gilderoy Lockhart (Kenneth Branagh),
and Quirinus Quirrell (Ian Hart), the original Defense Against The Dark Arts
teacher who was actually possessed by the world's most evil wizard. But Potions
master Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) most routinely and viciously terrorizes his
students. Harry Potter's greatest antagonist second only to Lord Voldemort,
Snape is ambiguously evil, and his true nature is one of the series' greatest
mysteries. A one-time servant of Voldemort who switched sides and swore loyalty
to headmaster Albus Dumbledore at great personal risk, Snape's history and
malicious treatment of Harry make him a constant suspect of greater evildoing.
Originally drawn as a menacing but fairly innocuous bat-like caricature, Snape
grows more malevolent as the series grows progressively darker, but while what
seem like his worst acts actually have semi-reasonable justifications, it's
harder to justify his blatant favoritism and abuses of authority in and out of
the classroom.

18. Dr. Phillip Barbay in Back To School

They should've let actor Paxton Whitehead keep his
real name to play the stuffy British professor Dr. Phillip Barbay in Rodney
Dangerfield's ridiculous, sometimes hilarious Back To School. Not only does Rodney
prove him a bad teacher—he's a business prof who knows nothing about the
business world—but he's also a stuffed shirt who tries to keep Rodney
from getting an education. Luckily, Ned Beatty's Dean Martin keeps him in his
place. Sam Kinison also makes an appearance—as either the world's
greatest or world's worst contemporary American history teacher.

19. Prof. Jerry Hathaway in Real Genius

Professor Jerry Hathaway hates popcorn, but he
loves easy money and doesn't mind a little bit of evil. When the CIA hires him
to create a laser that can eliminate human targets from space, he passes the
work along to his students—Val Kilmer in particular.
Hathaway—played by William Atherton—threatens to flunk Kilmer if he
doesn't complete the nefarious project. But all ends well, and the professor's
comeuppance involves lots of popcorn.

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20. Padre Manolo in Bad Education

There are twists within twists in Pedro Almodóvar's
Hitchcockian drama Bad Education, but they all point to one particular moment of
education gone bad. Schoolboys in the 1960s, young Ignacio and Enrique are
sweet on each other, which fills their teacher Padre Manolo (Daniel Giménez
Cacho), with rage and lust. To keep Enrique from being expelled, Ignacio pays a
terrible price. Then, years later, their abuser pays a price as well. But
that's just in a film the grown-up Enrique (Fele Martínez) is making from a
script by Ignacio (Gael García Bernal). Or is it?

21. Jim McAllister in Election

Matthew Broderick is such an instantly likeable
actor, and his character in Election is so full of good intentions, that it's easy to
overlook the fact that he's not necessarily a good teacher. Sure Tracy Flick
(Reese Witherspoon) is unbearable, and the source of Broderick's best pal's
marital woes. But it's not like anyone asked him to commit statutory
rape. There's spite behind Broderick's attempts to deny the overachiever her
place in student government, and in the end, outright deception unbecoming an
educator, even one motivated by the possibility of stopping a monster in her
youth.

22. Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Speaking of spite and Matthew Broderick, how
psychotic is Dean Ed Rooney's daylong quest to shut down Ferris Bueller's
likeable slacking? As played by Jeffrey Jones, Rooney remains so monomaniacal
that he practically earns a day in the fictional suburb of Shermer filled with
humiliation and pain—dog harassment, ruined shoes, the indignity of
taking the school bus—while his quarry treks through the most beautiful
parts of Chicago. Where Broderick's Election character defines his
responsibilities a little too loosely, Jones in Bueller is a slave to the job.
Maybe someone should tell him that life moves pretty fast, etc., etc.

23. Dean Gordon "Cheese" Pritchard in Old
School

In a role perfectly suited to his general
sleaziness, Jeremy Piven plays the vindictive Dean "Cheese" Pritchard in Old
School,
spending all of his scenes cartoonishly trying to shut down the fraternity
started by Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughan. The dirty dog even goes to far as to
hire a spy, but of course the plan backfires.

24. Dean Wormer in Animal House

A whole lot of movies about wacky hijinks on
campus got made in the wake of National Lampoon's Animal House, but John Vernon's Dean
Wormer remains the model for crusty, bitter old deans in every variant that's
appeared over the last 30 years. Wherever a humorless, mean stick-in-the-mud
prevents a gaggle of drunken louts from spending their parents' tuition money
on Jack Daniels, Dean Wormer will be there. Wherever double-secret probation is
enacted, Dean Wormer will be there. And whenever an authority figure gets
thrown into water, Dean Wormer will be there. So powerful did Dean Wormer prove
as an object of derision that his one good piece of advice—"fat, drunk,
and stupid is no way to go through life"—has been universally ignored
ever since.

25.
Mrs. Tingle in Teaching Mrs. Tingle

Almost
to the last, sadistic movie teachers abuse their students out of jealousy.
Could that be because most movies with bad educators want to flatter their teen
viewers? Maybe. Certainly Teaching Mrs. Tingle writer-director Kevin
Williamson knew a thing or two about playing to teens in the '90s, having
created the savvy, self-aware horror movie Scream and the savvy, self-aware
teen soap Dawson's Creek. In his sole directorial effort, however, he can't find a
tone, which lets Helen Mirren's grave performance as a sadistic instructor held
against her will by a could-be valedictorian (Katie Holmes) dominate the movie.
She's the only three-dimensional character around, making it too easy to wish
she would turn the tables on her tormentors. That can't have been part of Williamson's plan.

26. Mr. Woodcock in Mr. Woodcock

Giggle if you must at the world's
funniest-sounding shorebird, but not in Mr. Woodcock's gym. You'll have to run
laps—or worse, suffer the sort of humiliation that leads to
forever-diminished confidence and touchy-feely self-help books. As played by
Billy Bob Thornton, Woodcock is a humorless, militaristic middle-school gym
teacher who bullies the weakest, plumpest, and least coordinated boys in class.
He's not above forcing a wheezing asthmatic kid to run laps, for example, and
his random cup-checks involve whacking his students in the groin with a
whiffleball bat. In other words, not the sort of guy you want dating your
mother. At least not if you like her.