Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

telling for all those teachers everywhere who have asked me, as I described in chapter 10 , if their influence is too little too late with some children from some families – that ‘Evidence from our laboratory further reveals that teacher support may serve to compensate for low parent support … higher teacher support resulted in higher levels of self esteem.’
    Furthermore, OECD research found that being an avid and enthusiastic reader at school 9 was more of an advantage to a child than having educated and professional parents. In other words, do teachers make a difference to young people from troubled backgrounds who are battling to find their voice in the world? As sure as eggs are eggs and grandads carry Polos!
    And then there’s Robbie Williams. In the 2006 Emmy-award winning BBC documentary
The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive
, 10 Stephen Fry talked about his troubled school life and also interviewed other celebrities who have battled mental illness. One such interview was with former
Take That
singer Robbie Williams who has fought with mental illness, self-esteem issues and related drug and alcohol problems for a long time. For me, Williams was a prime example of someone who
felt
eminently capable but also, somehow,
felt
very unloveable. ‘My career went like that,’ he describes to Fry pointing upwards with one hand, ‘and my self-esteem and my depression went like that,’ as he points down with the other. Find someone in the staffroom with a copy of Williams’s 1997 CD
Life Thru a Lens
, then fast-forward track 11 until you get to about 13-and-a-half minutes. You will then hear a very powerful and personal poem by Williams aimed at a former English teacher of his who told him that all he was good for was joining the army, entitled
Hello Sir, Remember Me?
11 I haveknown schools that have based a whole day’s INSET looking at self-esteem and emotional intelligence around this one poem that reveals the extent to which teachers have the power to harm – or to significantly enhance – the young people in their care.
    Young people who are actually very talented but have a very low self-worth is something that I focus on especially when I am working with independent girls schools. I have met too many female teachers who tell me, once the unspoken subject is broached, how ‘stupid’ they felt at school but then, upon arriving at university where the population, although rarefied, was less so, realized that, actually, they were quite clever. You can see the look in their eyes that belies how angry and cheated they felt by the experience. Another female teacher I met told me how she had spent years teaching in the same school because she felt that if she moved, ‘they would find her out’. In
Britain on the Couch
, psychologist Oliver James reports on research conducted on working class and middle class girls in Great Britain that bears this observation out fully:
    All the middle class girls, without exception, were considerably more anxious and stressed than the working class girls. Despite mostly having done very well academically, they felt they had not achieved enough. … The majority of them (the middle class girls) went to schools where high performance was the norm and therefore high performance came to be regarded as average. A young woman who did well would not see herself as particularly outstanding because achievement was what was expected of her.
    (James 1998)
    James goes on to quote the head of a particularly high-achieving Birmingham girls’ school who says:
    Even our really clever girls do not realize how clever they are. All their friends are bright and intelligent and they do not realize everyone is not like that.
    (James 1998)
    Of note is the fact that the subtitle for James’s book is ‘Treating a Low Serotonin Society’. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, an imbalance of which is linked to clinical depression. Prozac works – and no-one is quite sure how – by raising levels of serotonin in the brain. In a 2008 report entitled
Adolescent School Failure Predicts Depression Among Girls
, the researchers found that there was a direct link between ‘adolescent school failures’ and depression in young adulthood in girls. (There were no such correlationsin boys.) And, as James’s work highlights, school failure isn’t an absolute. It’s relative and personal. If you think you are a failure, no matter what it says on the bits of paper, you are a failure. Bearing this in