Every senior figure in education should see the film version of Alan Bennett's The History Boys, argues Prof Dermot Keogh, head of the history department at University College Cork.
A Saturday afternoon of monsoon rains was a good occasion to choose to visit a local multiplex. It took the mind off the long-term effects of global warming. The theatre was small and the audience select - some 30 people. Within half an hour of the opening credits, we were an even more select group. Our number was halved; the majority of the teenagers had left, bored or disappointed at not being presented with a version of Carry On Teacher. But there may have been more to it. Many were ill at ease from the outset, talking loudly and making comments which irritated older cinema-goers. Perhaps, they were embarrassed because they were being challenged by a serious subject, and by the reality of their own daily school-going lives.
The History Boys is a very successful adaptation of Alan Bennett's highly acclaimed play of the same name. His characteristic blend of comedy and tragedy is enjoyable and thought-provoking, covering various themes which include the small matters of the purpose of education, conflicting educational philosophies, debate over teaching methods and a critique of the English educational "caste" system. The themes of sexual identity and, very directly, the crime of pederasty are interwoven through the film.
Set in an all-boys grammar school in Sheffield, in 1983, the film focuses on the lives of eight students from a multi-ethnic, mostly working class, background, who are brought back for an extra term to prepare for scholarship entrance exams in history for Oxbridge. Apart from a brief glimpse of a born-again Christian gym teacher and a marginalised and alienated history of art teacher, the action focuses upon four personalities. There is the headmaster, a geographer with a degree from Hull, who is a snob and wants academic success at any price. He looks and acts less intelligently than the colonel in Fawlty Towers, being embarrassed because one of his scholarship boys is dressed in the opening scene as a milkman.
There is Ms Mintott, a history teacher with a degree from Durham University, who shows her passion for her subject in one memorable scene when she presents the follies of the last few hundred years as being attributable to patriarchy. (Her point is to suggest to the boys that it might not have occurred to them that they might be interviewed at Oxbridge by a woman.) She has been professionally sidelined by the arrival of Mr Irwin, a temporary teacher brought in to provide the winning formula and get the boys scholarships to Oxbridge. He had recently graduated from, he claims, an Oxbridge college. That turns out to be a lie. (I can't remember what perfectly respectable British university graduated from.) His job is to get the boys into Oxbridge and thus raise the reputation of the school.
Then there is Hector who is a graduate of Sheffield University and is most content to have gone there. He stands for a non-utilitarian philosophy of education. He seeks to excite the minds of his pupils, encourages them to learn for pleasure, enjoyment and personal fulfilment. His classroom is anarchic but creative, filled with poetry, music and spontaneity. Hector appears to have got his students to memorise, without pressure, large amounts of poetry, plays and popular songs. He is the enemy of "progress" and the teacher from whom the headmaster mistakenly thinks he can retrieve an extra period for history.
As a teacher for over 25 years, I found that Mr Irwin's approach to the teaching of history made my blood run cold. Is this the way that all university education is going? Not while some of us are left standing! Irwin reduced history to a formula. He is the enemy of the dull. He does not want originality of thought. He asks: "What has truth got to do with it. What has truth got to do with anything?" Irwin is, I think, a relativist. He wants to encourage originality of packaging and presentation, but not, God forbid, of ideas. Marketing techniques will, he claims, get your scholarship essay noticed at Oxbridge. As it turns out, Irwin never went to Oxbridge. He was not clever enough, he later admits. But we are told that he developed a highly successful career as a "telly don" later in the 1980s in Mrs Thatcher's Britain.
Ms Mintott, the sidelined teacher, assures us at the end of the film that the programmes he makes are in content more journalism than history. Her warning is unnecessary. He has shown his form. His approach to history might get a student into Oxbridge - and that I would doubt very much - but his way of teaching the subject is truly the appalling vista. However, even this machine of a temporary teacher is momentarily moved before a war memorial when he says to his class something almost meaningful about how societies forget and neutralise memory by ritualised and frequent commemoration ceremonies.
Irwin is not without his virtues. But he is a frightening spectre, one who would do very well in a quality review.
There is a very strong scene where all the three teachers are sitting around preparing the candidates for their interviews. They begin to discuss the Holocaust. Irwin is animated, regarding it as an interesting topic. There is also mention of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. A Jewish student, a sensitive, musically-gifted boy with strong homosexual feelings, finds Irwin's crass approach to the Holocaust too much and says, something like "but I did not lose relatives in the dissolution of the monasteries." There is an interesting juxtaposition. Irwin regards history as technique that can be packaged into a scholarship-winning formula for Oxbridge. But the subject also touches the personal lives of his students. It can't be presented as series of facts in a TV advertisement without doing violence to the subject itself.
Quite what the film says about author Alan Bennett'sview of Oxford and Cambridge is not properly fleshed out in the film. It is clear that the pursuit of a place there to study history is never questioned in the grammar school hierarchy. Sadly, it is not once challenged by Ms Lintott, who had gone to the University of Durham, which has, in real life, an outstanding reputation for history. Is Bennett saying that you can pull the wool over the eyes of the Oxbridge entrance boards by being novel - but never dull - provided you follow the Irwin formula. Yes, he is. And, you can get there, even if want to or not.
In the end, seven out of the eight get places in to their chosen Oxbridge colleges. There is a scene of wild celebrations in the principal's office. The school has achieved almost the perfect result. All the boys are present, together with the teachers.
The one boy who did not get in turns up at the school but does not go to the party. In a conversation with Ms Lintott, it transpires that he has got in and he had been told so the day of the interview. Things had not been going well for him at the interview until a clergyman on the board asked if by chance he was related to a porter who had worked in the college many years before. When he replied that the man was his father, he was given the green light. His father was well known to the clergyman.
Patronage, and the highly developed art of condescending to the lower orders, won out in the end. He was in. So much for history formulas. If I am not mistaken, he was the boy who delivered the memorable line earlier in the film that "history is just one f***ing thing after another". Honest and strongly individualistic, he was the only one of the eight who did not take up his scholarship and go on the high road to Oxbridge. Was he (I am not sure) the one who joined the British army and was killed by friendly fire at the age of 28?
As for the others, one becomes a tax consultant and makes pots of money. There are, among the others, builders and so on. They had made their peace with Thatcher's Britain and prospered, including Irwin.
Only one boy becomes a teacher, possibly inspired by the free spirited Hector. He is the boy who had confided to Irwin earlier in the film: "I'm a Jew, I'm small. I'm homosexual. And I live in Sheffield. I'm f***ed." In fact, he may have been the only one of the eight to realise his potential, think for himself, and keep the spirit of Hector alive.
Every member of the Department of Education, Higher Education Authority and assorted university planners should see this film. But will Alan Bennett's philosophy chime with those who seek to follow the failed English model in higher education? It may tell one much more than any consultant's report will ever reveal about the nature of education.
