I know that I’ve been a bit lax at updating this blog of late. Partly, this is because the job of teaching can, at times, be pretty manic. Partly, it’s because I have been directing my energies into writing a play for production next March. It is the latter of these two great time-consumers that has got me thinking about the whole issue of school-based dramas. I’m going to be honest: I don’t like them. I never have.
Perhaps the reason is that I was first introduced to school stories via the medium of 1970s humour comics. I’m not talking here about those behemoths of juvenile gag-mongering, “Beano” and “Dandy” (although they defined the genre), but lazily produced rags with titles like “Buster”, “Whizzer and Chips” and - my favourite at the time – “Monster Fun”. Being aimed at children, these featured many school-centred stories - stories that I simply did not understand. They were populated by urchin-like kids and teachers who were all old, dorky types with mortar boards and gowns. The world they inhabited was one in which bullies were buffoon-like clowns who were more-or-less harmless and easily outwitted. It was one in which phrases such as “six of the best” and “japes” were thrown around with great familiarity by the characters - only to go straight over my head. It was one in which every caper-heavy episode ended with a kid or kids getting a severe caning, despite having done nothing particularly evil. Still, nobody really got hurt because the brunt of the batterings was taken by magazines stuffed artfully down shorts.
As a normal suburban lad, I could not relate to the endless merry wars conducted between cheeky rapscallions and foolish “beaks” through the pages of those silly comics. It seemed to me even then that the real world was a more complex place than that familiar, old fashioned, narrative formula allowed. You might think, then, that the many attempts to update school dramas in recent years would have changed my mind. Er… no…
For me, the main problem is that schools are inherently un-dramatic places. This may appear a strange statement given the number of plays, films, TV shows and books that have taken schools as their settings. But, the truth is that a classroom is a static environment – it’s not that interesting to look at and what goes on there could hardly be described as packed with variety. Then there are the relationships in schools. If the focus is only on relationships between pupils, the setting becomes irrelevant. All the best kid flicks do not really take place in schools. In fact, many are about what happens when young people escape the confines of their schools (“Stand by Me”, anyone?). Even something like “The Inbetweeners” only makes occasional use of the school environment, most of the stories taking place in the world outside. Equally, if the narrative follows only teachers and their interactions, then, again, there is no particular necessity for the school setting, unless – as in “Half Nelson” – the aim is to highlight the dichotomy between a person’s respectable public persona and their private, very flawed reality. But, in that instance, the character’s job becomes purely symbolic and a wide range of figures would do just as well as a teacher – for example, doctors, lawyers and policemen.
The only relationship that makes a school indispensible to the narrative is that between pupils and teachers. Ignoring the degree to which that relationship has become increasingly complicated over the last couple of decades, it does, again, present an issue in that it only really lends itself to one plot, the one that we might call “Maverick Teacher”. It’s a simple enough story (you’ve seen it many times): a new teacher arrives in a school that is either stuffy or under-achieving or both; he or she has an unusual background for a teacher (read: he or she is not institutionalized and, thus, has not had their imagination squeezed out of them); he or she is treated with suspicion by the head teacher and hostility by most of his or her colleagues (apart from the one who secretly admires him or her and probably becomes his or her lover); nevertheless, he or she uses all sorts of pedagogically dubious methods to have a permanent, inspiring impact on his or her pupils; he or she is sacked on entirely spurious grounds but has the consolation of leaving the school premises for the last time to the cheering/singing voices of his or her devoted pupils. The end. It’s “To Sir, With Love”, “Dead Poets’ Society”, “The Class of Miss MacMichael” – yawn, yawn – and so on and so on… The estimable Alan Bennett, for all of his peppering the dialogue with c-bombs, could only come up with a variation of this hoary old nonsense in the mysteriously lauded “History Boys”.
The deeper question, of course, is why does this narrative resonate so much? One simple answer is that it has conflict built into it and drama needs conflict. Think of a story in which a teacher joins a school, gets on with everyone and learns all the policy documents off by heart before achieving an “excellent” at the next inspection: fancy that one? Me neither.
The “Maverick Teacher” plot, however, serves another function. A teacher is a figure of authority. In the respect that he or she is largely responsible for passing on a society’s codes and values, he or she is possibly the ultimate figure of authority. Drama has always had a strong anti-authoritarian streak to it. If we want to get all anthropological about this, we might say that drama originated in festivals and rituals that were deliberately intended to allow people to “let off steam” by challenging authority – the bigger picture being that, in doing so, they actually ended up reinforcing it. The maverick teacher is a challenge to established authority; he or she is never presented as an alternative to it. He or she is an outsider. Again, imagine a plot in which the maverick teacher’s colleagues have an epiphany and all start to use his or her methods in their work. The recent television series “Jamie’s Dream School” presented a fantasy in which all of a school’s teachers were, in one way or another, of the “maverick” variety. Touted as a documentary (although the “career destinations” of the school’s “graduates” suggested that there was more than a hint of smoke and mirrors about the whole thing), the programme eloquently illustrated what happens when outsiders become insiders – the status quo re-emerges. Jamie’s “Dream” School operated in exactly the same way as – that’s right! - a school.
The point, then, is that the maverick teacher also reinforces society’s values, but in a subtle way. Consider the authority that he or she challenges: it is invariably corrupt, insincere, unwholesome. Jamie began every edition of his series by talking about a “system” that “lets down” thousands of youngsters every year. What the maverick teacher represents is a more profound ethical agenda. Robin Williams in “Dead Poets’ Society” encourages his charges to express themselves and follow their dreams. Far from being the stuff of nightmares, these are cherished values of the society in which the film is set. Mr Thingy in “History Boys” takes a similar line, producing free-thinking intellectuals - in stark contrast to Mr Other-Thingy whose deadening concentration on the drier aspects of the academic process is seen to be hollow and destructive.
It’s a theme I’ve touched on before, but the maverick teacher negotiates the difficult border between the individual and his or her social context. He or she is the former, but in a way that maintains the latter.
In that respect, school dramas are interesting, but I have to say that I still don’t like the things…
