"It's just one fucking thing after another."

I'm referring to history, of course, and a quote in The History Boys, which was a good movie based on a play I'd be interested in seeing. (The reviews of the movie I read reacted favorably to the movie, but also indicated that it was missing a certain pizazz that the play had.) The version of the quote in the trailer is slightly tamer, but that's to be expected.

I saw an underlying cynicism in the movie. It is about some high school students who are desperately trying to get int Oxford or Cambridge (though at some point in the movie that becomes just Oxford---one isn't actually allowed to apply to both for undergrad in the same year), and their principle really wants to send them there as well. In the movie, they took shots at other universities -- such as Bristol and Loughborough -- which have some very good faculty, at least in the mathematical and physical sciences. Well, they didn't so much take shots at them beyond painting them as just another of a large number of universities. Nevertheless, the movie definitely conveyed the attitude that anything less than Oxford and Cambridge isn't worth much in the UK, and my understanding is that that attitude is still quite prevalent and that this sort of elitism is apparently more acute there than it is here. Ask me in a couple years, and I'll let you know what I experience firsthand.

A major focus of the movie becomes how to get the students into Oxford, and the general piece of advice they were given is to take unusual slants on their essays so that they stand out. While that's certainly something that can be extremely good, for the people in the movie, the importance of getting in (for the students, their teachers, and the principal) unfortunately far outweighed that of academic integrity. In some cases (especially in one case), the students wrote essays taking perspectives with which they disagreed because if they just wrote a very good essay with correct facts that took a conventional point of view, then they would (Cthulhu forbid) end up going to a school like Bristol but never Oxford or Cambridge. ("Bristol welcomes you with open arms!") A review of the movie I read in LA Weekly discusses that the movie is about 'teaching to tests' (with facts, facts, and facts a la Dickens' Hard Times --- "Imagine? Never do that!" is one of the big quotes in that book) versus trying to get an education that involves thinking. However, the educational dynamicism in the students' essays wasn't about thinking but about arranging oneself to be the type of student Oxford or Cambridge wants.

(It reminds me of the people in high school whose motivation to become student body leaders or to do charity work was to pad their resumes. Obviously, many people do these things for better reasons, but a lot of them do it so they can get into a "better" college. I think anybody who knows me at all can guess what I think of that, and I pissed off a couple people once or twice in high school when stating this opinion after somebody admitted they were, say, running for a high school office for this reason. It's ok for something like that to be part of the equation, but it shouldn't be the primary reason.) So, it seems this was less a discussion of teaching to tests vs. real education than a discussion of teaching facts versus teaching the tricks one can use to maximize one's chances of getting into Oxford or Cambridge.

The movie is set in the early 80s (1983 or 1984), and included several songs from the era (such as Blue Monday) that I like a lot. There were also a number of good lines ("He loved words..."), which you can check out on the IMDB page. The movie isn't superb, but it's good and movies with 80s music and lots of witty comments appeal to some of my innermost desires.

By the way, history is also bunk, at least according to some people. (I can't remember who originally uttered this phrase, but it's one of the main things I remember from my 9th grade history class. It came up the first day, in which we discussed what history is. However, it's really just one fucking thing after another.)

Oh, and compound adjectives are absolutely key. They play an important role in the story. So does homeroticism (though that's not so clear from the trailer). In fact, these two concepts are occasionally coupled in the movie.

Anyway, the movie is worth seeing and it's occasionally thought-provoking with respect to high school education issues (though the bent definitely seems to be a cynical one).