Education, Education, Education

Alan Bennett's latest stage play returns to the subject of his first, "Forty Years On" (1968). Education is the name of the game in The History Boys, in which a small group of precocious boys from a Yorkshire grammar school prepare for their Oxbridge entrance exams during the Thatcherite 1980s. They are helped in this endeavour by two teachers with very different teaching styles.

Hector is close to retirement and takes an "old school", liberal and romantic approach to education. He prefers to nourish boys' souls rather than filling their heads with dry facts, and the play ponders which is better, to know literature from the heart or to simply be able to recite it. "Exams are the enemy of education," he proclaims and describes the boys' A-level results as their "emblems of conformity". His unorthodox teaching methods include getting his boys to recite Gracie Fields dialogues, or perfect their French by impersonating clients in a French brothel.

Irwin, on the other hand, is fresh out of teaching college and believes in the Thatcherite ideals of meeting targets and passing exams. His beliefs are far from simplified (he berates his boys for producing stock answers to historical questions, insisting they explore their subjects from various, at times, subversive, angles - "The wrong end of the stick is the right one," he declares) but he encourages free thinking only as a means to an end: to impress the Oxbridge examiners.

Bennett pits several other themes against these ideological battles, including sexuality (both the boys' and the teachers'), molestation (a harmless grope?), and the role of women in history (the only woman in the play compares the teaching of history to "teaching five centuries of masculine ineptitude").

I saw this last night at the Lyttelton on the South Bank. Overall, I found it thoughtfully funny and filled with witty one-liners. However, the play felt ahistorical with the dialogue evoking the 1950s more than the 1980s. I also felt that Bennett crammed so many ideas in to 3 hours (yes, a flabby 3 hours) that some subjects - notably molestation and the gendered nature of history - were simply glossed over, and the main themes of education, history and "youth" were handled at such reckless speed that at times I completely lost track of everything. The play didn't work for me on a cohesive level, but many of the individual elements were provocative and entertaining enough that I had a great evening.

Other links today:
+ Tom Coates' pithy definition of social software: "Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking." And his more lengthy description.
+ 10GB microdrives (the type used in iPod Minis) and 5GB Compact Flash cards. Storage is the new chips.
+ Wikipedia's entry on the Indian Ocean earthquake
+ Are you ready? With the help of the US Department of Homeland Security, you will be.