Family.
Parents are the first teachers. A parent teaches their child through their actions and words. Ninja parents are no different in that respect. Some ninja parents can pass down family techniques or bloodlines. More often, they can pass down the basic conditioning, work ethic, and a few of the training methods required to be a ninja.
The Academy.
The ninja academy teaches many of the same things as a normal school, but with an expanded Physical Education discipline. At least fifty percent of the students at the academy fail and return to civilian life. Therefore, the academy must provide the same education given at other schools - on top of the basic ninja skills. Basic taijutsu forms, skills with common ninja tools, and trap detection/disarming are all considered worthwhile for the common civilian - as well as being essentials for ninja life. Basic jutsus - Henge, Bunshin, and Kawamiri – are available for anyone who wishes to learn them.
Students who wish to become career ninja will often perform at a lower level of academics then the others. They tend to notice that time spent perfecting throwing skills may be more useful than calculating those throwing skills in the classroom. Many upper-level ninjas would probably be stumped by some of the questions asked on tests. This is why only the ninja skill portions are required for graduation. Good reflexes and a creative mind are the important things taught at the academy. The capacity to kill must be found elsewhere.
Teachers.
Chuunin instructors are ninjas who are taking a break from active duty. Their normal missions usually require a large amount of time spent out of the village, so a teaching job in the village can seem more relaxing. The reality of being an academy teacher generally wears down their patience with students quickly. It provides valuable training experiences for ninjas who wish to advance to the position of being pure Jounin instructors though. A grounding in 'what students actually learn in the academy' vs. 'what they're expected to learn' is what the job could be called. In post-war Konoha, teaching experience is considered a an excellent prerequisite for becoming a Jounin.
Jounin instructors almost always lead teams that were numbered the same as their original genin squads. This usually doesn't create a problem, since only one member of a Genin squad is expected to survive to Jounin. One Jounin-level ninja and two casualties was a hopeful prediction during the war. Fascinating in an abstract sense, but more morbid in practice. The current expectation is still only one Jounin per team of three, but the survival chances for ninja have gone up a surprising amount since the last Great Ninja War. In the past, few teams would be successful in giving more then two Jounin to Konoha. That is part of what made the Sandaime's team and the Sannin so memorable.
Team Seven.
One of the worst kept secrets among Konoha's ninja was that a Jounin would only ever lead a team number that they were a part of as a Genin. This thinned the ranks of active ninja able to take command of any Genin team number. Thankfully – or perhaps regretfully – there were very few conflicts caused by this tradition; on any given team of three, only one was ever expected to reach the Jounin rank or above. Combining life expectancy, injury rates, body strain, and the raw talent required, thirty-three percent reaching the Jounin rank would have been an amazing statistic. After all of the people eligible to teach a certain team number were "retired" in some manner, the number was immediately recycled. It was a testament to the survivability of Konoha-nin that only two numbers had ever hit that measurement – Team One and Team Three.
Of course, this means that there were very few ninja alive who could be chosen to lead Team Seven. The Sandaime and his teammates were busy and/or retired. The Legendary Sannin had become totally consumed by a carnival of personal problems and indulgences. Yondaime was dead. The Yondaime's teammates were unavailable. All tallied up, that left one Hatake Kakashi and an apprentice named Mitarashi Anko. Kakashi had seniority over the former apprentice, and Anko was simply considered to be one of the worst people on the planet to expose children to. Anko was also a Special Jounin, but the ins and outs of that rank can be left for another time.
Team Leader.
Meanwhile, there is Hatake Kakashi. A ninja made of bad memories and regrets. A ninja forged in the fires of the last great war. This man spent his youth running from the stigma of a cowardly father. Almost no friends, numerous enemies, and a bad reputation. He had lost everything but his country.
He failed teams for being young and naïve. Kakashi was a strong believer in the fact that Konoha ninja were strong because they were not alone. The teams given to him were always high scoring in the academy, but not very good at working together. They were sheep, and they would die when they were confronted by pain and death.
Kakashi passed a team though. The team is seen as a toast to his former team.
The many who believe that aren't quite right though. They have forgotten Obito and Rin. But Kakashi? Kakashi will never let them go. It's one of the reasons he reads Jiraiya's book, because Jiraiya's books are silent tributes to those that have passed. Admittedly, Rin and Tsunade would never be caught dead in any kind of threesome, but the tribute is between the lines. A code of sorts. Underneath the smut, and underneath the fantasy.
Apologies. For leaving. For never visiting. For failing. For whatever he thought he did wrong.
Jiraiya knew that the apologies will probably never reach the people they're meant for, they (He?) were all too stuffy to read his smutty novels or they (She?) were simply too lost to care. Or because they were dead.
The Idiot.
People see Obito in Naruto. Both of them were loud tricksters, but that is the only similarity between the two. Everyone liked Obito. He was the kind of popular guy that messed around a little bit, but was still almost universally loved. He wasn't the best ninja, and he might not even have passed the academy requirements after the war. Nonetheless, the Fourth Hokage shaped him into a well-rounded ninja - nothing special, but not deficient. To the Uchiha clan, he was just another loud cousin. He wasn't too powerful, but could always be counted on for a quick laugh.
To Rin and Kakashi, he was the teammate that kept their spirits up. He would be late to team meetings, whined about training, and made outrageous claims about beating Kakashi when he got the Sharingan. He was like a younger brother who didn't quite understand everyone's problems, but still made everyone try and look to the bright side. The younger brother that everyone put up with, but nobody really took seriously.
Naruto is widely disliked. He would sooner get slapped in the face then be allowed to help an old lady up. People laugh at his misfortune, and he laughs with them. Naruto did fail the academy - three times even -, finally passing because of a one-in-a-million chance and the Kyuubi. There is no family for him to return to, no team that he is the endearing younger brother to. Sasuke would ignore Naruto until he got powerful, and only then would he even look at him a second time. Sakura simply didn't care about Naruto unless Sasuke was in danger. Kakashi just believed that Naruto would survive.
The Fangirl.
Rin was like a more mature Sakura. Rin was a better ninja. Rin was tougher, more useful, and started her medic training directly after becoming a genin. In short, she knew her weaknesses and immediately acted to make them less noticeable. Rin was more like Tenten than Sakura. There was a quick intellect mixed with an independent mind. In the village, Rin was simply another too-young soldier. Her family was tired from the war – all of them were ninja – and no one was around each other enough to watch over each other very well. Her parents would ultimately die in meaningless battles against Iwa.
Rin was not bound to follow quietly, but would stand at equal ground with her teammates. She would push them, drive them, hurt them, and love them – all at the same time. The older sister that took care of them a little bit, that knew when to look for help. Obito would go and look for Rin whenever he needed help with anything. Kakashi would encounter her in many different places, and he greeted her politely every time – Kakashi rarely greeted anyone when off-duty, making this affection meaningful.
Sakura is a girly girl. She was adept at using extremely basic Jutsus, but never bothered to learn anything else. She would be weak until there was no one left for her to hide behind. All of her so-called skills were essentially useless in combat. No endurance, no techniques, nothing special. Sakura was a dead weight to her team. Her parents had never quite prepared her for the reality of life, and she expected her ninja life to be as simple as her father's job as a pencil pusher around town. No matter how quick her mind was, it had never really latched on to the "soldier" part of being a ninja.
In any case, her teammates regarded her as a relatively useless person. Sasuke, because he couldn't regard anyone with respect, and Naruto, because he believed – rightly so – that she needed to be protected. Kakashi kept expecting her to do something to make herself better, and then he could give her some advice or direction.
The Genius.
Kakashi and Sasuke were both in the top of their academy classes. They were both relatively arrogant, believing that their strength was greater than anyone's. Both individuals eventually obtained the Sharingan. And both of them were driven by something in their childhood. The similarities ended there.
Hatake Kakashi was pitied in the village, or given looks of disgust. The actions of his father had made him an outcast and not worthy of notice. Then, Kakashi graduated from the academy in a time of war. Not only did the time frame mean lowered expectations, but also it meant heightened danger in all of his missions. Kakashi killed a man well before Sasuke was even a Genin. He had watched men die in an assortment of ways before Sasuke was even close to killing a man. The Sharingan made Kakashi legendary, but why was he so much better than the fabled Uchiha clan with it? No, obtaining the Sharingan was never the defining moment of Kakashi's ninja career, it was simply a bonus that propelled him much faster than anyone ever expected. Kakashi was a genius shinobi, who was carefully tempered in a time of war. The childhood that trampled him down was disgrace. His father was a coward, who became a lush and then committed suicide. Kakashi watched a man self-destruct, because that man cared about his subordinates. So he became a man to redeem his father's shame. And then someone taught him that his father's true shame was giving up. His friend died to beat it into his head, and Kakashi became one of the greatest ninja in the Hidden Leaf.
Sasuke was nothing special. The top of his academy class meant nothing, he graduated at a perfectly reasonable rate. Sasuke was expected to do household chores, fetch and carry things, and basically be a kid for his missions. When he was finally introduced to battle, his textbook reactions were only to be expected from someone who had succeeded at the basic objectives of the Ninja Academy. Gaining the Sharingan made Sasuke an overconfident and unbalanced shinobi. Essentially, Sasuke was better than everyone else because he was the last Uchiha in Konoha, and they jealously protected their bloodlines. And Konoha loved Sasuke. Konoha would bend over for his whims and desires. Konoha loved Sasuke, but Sasuke didn't care about Konoha.
The last Uchiha was no longer mentally stable though. The only desire he had was revenge, everything else was pushed behind that base desire to kill his brother. No one could ever change that opinion in him. When given the opportunity to take a shortcut, Sasuke took it. There wasn't a hard choice for him. There was only power, and those unwilling to give it to him.
The Teacher.
Finally, Kakashi was never the Yondaime. Kakashi knew he was a bad teacher, and did very little to change that fact. Kakashi had simply never spent time needing to learn very many things from a teacher. When he was becoming a ninja, everyone learned their combat lessons, and they practiced them – they practiced those lessons a lot. Anyone who didn't practice inevitably ended up dead. In fact, many of the people that practiced ended up dead anyway. Students didn't just learn lessons because they were spoon-fed, they learned their lessons to see the sun rise.
Students graduating in a peaceful Konoha? They couldn't be bothered to do good practice if it killed them. No matter what their desires or reasons for becoming a shinobi, they had no idea how they wanted to fight enemies. If his students could ever come up with a request more complex than "Teach me, Sensei!" then perhaps Kakashi would do something. The skills necessary for being a ninja were numerous, but the most useful skills seemed to always be the ones that no one liked to practice. Team training and drills. First of all, Kakashi's team was bad at team training. They had no sense of focus, and no real reason to understand why they should focus on it. Second of all, no one ever liked doing drills at first – except for Maito Gai, who had inevitably instilled that respect for drills into his students.
Yondaime had a ready and willing team for his teaching exercises. He cared about his students a lot, and they were all quite interested in learning how to be good ninja. They worked at team training, because they understood how important it was. Everyone took training seriously, and the Yondaime was a very well rounded ninja, who made an effort to teach each of his students useful skills. He tried to be understanding, attentive, and he paid attention to his students, drilling them carefully.
No one saw all of those things in Kakashi's team. Jiraiya was distant and afraid of forming close bonds with anyone. The Sandaime was simply too busy to see everything. Maito Gai or Sarutobi Asuma might have seen pieces of the truth. There were a few others who may have seen the truth, but the important person was Kakashi. Kakashi tried to never look at his team like that. He saw the shades of his old team there sometimes, but then he would get lost in accusing eyes that only he could see. No, Kakashi saw his team as just that. His team. Much like his blankets, or his apartment. The emotional attachment was more like annoying younger siblings than any children. He was almost incapable of the attachment required to make him a great Genin team leader.
As an ANBU commander, Kakashi excelled. The detachment and utter ruthlessness required lent itself handily to the fear of emotional connections that Kakashi held.
Teamwork.
A team started with a family. It didn't need to be a conventional family, like some believed, or even an unconventional family. It just had to be a group of people that cared about each other. Team Seven was never very good at admitting to themselves what kind of family they were, but they were usually a family of some kind. Sarutobi still drank and smoked with his teammates, no matter how often they didn't see eye to eye on issues in the village. The Sannin had been a motley crew, filled with silliness and irritation when they were still an official team; Jiraya would put Orochimaru in headlocks, dragging him on some silly adventure (usually to the hot springs); Tsunade would beat on them both (for perversion and annoyance), and Orochimaru would always be trying to get the most attention from the Sandaime.
Kakashi thought that Obito was stupid and annoying, but whenever the Uchiha was in danger he was there to back him up. Rin thought that Kakashi was cute - if a little crazy - and that Obito wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she loved them both like comrades that would always be together. Yondaime loved his squad like his younger brothers and sisters that he was always keeping track of. He taught them, took them out to dinner, was a shoulder to cry on, and tried to always keep an eye out for anyone that might hurt them.
Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura.
They failed the test of becoming family. Naruto wished for it, as hard as he could, but would never get it. Sasuke pushed it away, because he had already lost one family. Sakura couldn't understand why she needed a new family. Kakashi never wanted a new family, he was simply waiting to rejoin his when he died.
Family. One thing that Team Seven wasn't. One more reason why they failed.
Author's Notes: This is a Naruto One-shot I've had floating around for awhile. I might use it as a springboard for another fic at some point, because I like some of the ideas. I don't think it's much more then an extended drabble on Konoha ninja society and Team Seven in particular. Maybe even a short essay in parts. It's pretty sketchily edited, but it will work for a drabble.
Oh well, it's pretty AU, I don't use the Yondaime's official name (Namikaze Minato) or his fanon name (Kazama Arashi) because it really isn't relevant here.
Read and review at your own desire, I hope you enjoyed it.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, or anything that is the property of Masashi Kishimoto, Shonen Jump, Viz, and whoever else owns the series depending on your area of the world.