Weekend Watch: The devil is in the details

With the classroom the site of increasingly loud culture war battles, it's easy to neglect a more fundamental question: What makes for a good teacher?

The 2002 documentary “To Be and to Have” offers one answer. It depicts a year in a tiny, one-room schoolhouse in northern France, where soon-to-retire veteran teacher Georges Lopez teaches 12 children ranging in age from 4 to 11.

“To Be and to Have” doesn't editorialize or romanticize. The camera simply watches as the ever-calm and patient Lopez teaches reading and writing, adjudicates playground disputes, and imparts lessons in responsibility and time-management.

This stripped-down approach is enough to remind us of how much is at stake in the earliest days of our education and how much of an impact the right person can make.

Sony Pictures Classics

Even the best teachers are not meant to supplant parents; that they should is one of the more pernicious ideas currently undermining education in America. TikTok "educators" blithely cackling about indoctrinating their young charges would do well to consider how much they don't know about actually raising a child.

Daniel Johnston was clearly a handful for his parents long after his schooling ended.

While Johnston was a gifted songwriter and a uniquely compelling performer, the most stunning moment in the documentary "The Devil and Daniel Johnston" comes from the quietly anguished testimony of his father, Bill.

Fighting back tears in the manner of someone congenitally averse to making a spectacle of his emotions, the elder Johnston describes flying his son back from a 1990 gig in Austin in a two-seater plane.

Daniel had a psychotic break and, convinced he was a Casper the ghost (one of his recurring obsessions), turned off the ignition and threw the key out the window. Miraculously, the former Air Force pilot managed to land the plane safely.

The myth of the mad artistic genius dies hard, especially when it comes to rock and roll. Yet, Johnston was not a typical guitar-smashing poète maudit.

Fat, goofy, and guileless, with a high-pitched voice and a fundamentally childish outlook, he was assailed by a devastating sickness that he was lucky to survive as long as he did (he died five years ago at 58 of a heart attack).

To this we can surely credit his talent and the opportunities he had to express it; but we shouldn't overlook the relentless, often thankless, efforts of his father to protect and care for him long before and long after the cognoscenti took an interest in his brilliant, long-suffering son.