I watched 'The History Boys' for the first time last night. I asked myself, why is this the first time? It's because when it came out, first as a play and then as the film, all the write-ups made it sound so close to my own schooling that I think I was almost afraid to go and see it. And I was right! There were so many overlaps and coincidences that I was wincing - all exacerbated when I realised (nearly 10 years later than anyone who went to my school!) that many of the scenes were shot at my old school. This made it feel even more as if I was in the scenes. I realise that this is absurdly egotistical, but then I thought again: maybe it's much better to think of it as a play/film that captured something (but what?) of that tiny, tiny layer in society that I belonged/belong to. (For my last two years at school, I went to Watford Boys Grammar and then I went to Oxford University (via doing a year at Middlesex Hospital Medical School. ).
This then led me to wonder about why or how this tiny fraction got to be amplified and sanctified by this play and film. And from there I got to thinking about how (or why not) the film dealt with the matter of class. In one sense, the whole film is about class though a lot of it seems to be about how England creates an 'intellectual' along with a particular view about sex (in that environment).
I've always been of the view that society creates education rather than education creates society, though as Marx puts it (or something like it) 'Even the educator is educated'. In other words though society creates education, there is a way in which the education that society creates, does its bit of creating of society in return. Within the scope of this play/film it was hard to see how the big motor of society creating education (this specific form of education) ever appeared. The one moment when it could have done, perhaps, was at the end when we hear (in a flash-forward form) what happened to the boys in later life. In fact most of them are shown to have ended up in middle class jobs - not even what we might call upper-middle class jobs.
So here's the class bit. These old grammar schools and foundation schools do succeed in getting students into Oxbridge in what used to be a largely private ('Public') school enclave. Why? What function does it all serve? Why does this society like this, and encourage it? Presumably because there is some kind of consensus that this is a good way to create a 'cadre' of 'top' scientists, administrators, lawyers, judges, and CEOs. ``But more than that, this 'cadre' has learned how to reproduce itself (see Pierre Bourdieu). In other words, the 'cadre' (in this case 'grammar school boys') keeps the institutions and the channels open. Sons follow in fathers' footsteps.
So then we come to the matter of what appears to be the substance of the film (I'm not sure it is, and if it is, I'm not sure it actually dealt with it!) 'what is history?' and 'how do we teach it?'. Imagine for a moment if the action of the film was taking place during a major war, then 'history' would have been coming in through the windows. The issue of recruitment and training an officer class for that war, would have been central to everything. The boys would have been divided between jingoists, accepters and rejecters. 'History' wouldn't have been something abstract or even cynically reduced by the Rudge character to 'one thing after another' (or some such).
Perhaps I missed it, but we didn't get a sense of the boys reflecting on how they were being 'made' for a particular niche or place in society. As it happens, my year and the year above me at Watford did reflect on those things, did try to work out how the actual nature of the knowledge and the teaching methods and exam systems they were giving us, was a preparation for roles in society they thought we should or would take up. We even figured out that things like the Prefect system were part of how they were trying to train us for this cadre and some of us (well me) refused to become a Prefect.
The sexuality issue was interesting in that though the story is set in 1980s, it was certainly a live issue in the early 60s when I was in the sixth form. It was an issue in different ways, in that we were openly homophobic. In fact, there was a way in which we policed ourselves to be homophobic. Meanwhile, there was one teacher who was understood to be what we would now call a 'molester'. So there's a contradiction there: we were intolerant of homosexuality but the authorities were tolerant of someone molesting students.
Finally, the Jewish boy. I'm afraid I may have dozed off at one point where the plotline that involved him came into play but this too was very near to home. As far as I ever understood at the time, I was the only Jewish boy in the Watford Sixth Form at that particular time (1962-64). It's possible there were one or two others who had learned how to keep out of sight so they could avoid having it being used as part of low-level jibing and mocking. So I arrived into a school, that didn't seem to 'know' Jewish students. I came with my own version of Jewishness (historically aware, coming out of the radical, Communist, and 'Bundist' (Jewish Socialist) traditions) a nuance that the jibers and mockers didn't 'see'. Within weeks of my being at the school, I was on the receiving end of jokes that I had never heard before. Two of my year group would throw money on the floor and say, 'O you better not do that, he'll pick it up and you won't get it back.' (there were variations on this.) At that moment, I didn't even really know the trope (in face to face terms in London 1962) that Jews and cash in your pocket was a thing. I didn't know that there were jokes that someone who wasn't Jewish could say against someone who was Jewish, along those lines.
As it happens, because I didn't rise to the bait (mostly because I didn't 'get' it), this stuff dissipated after a few weeks, and never came back. It was more of an opening salvo in the male jostling for the upper-hand than a consistent piece of insulting or persecution. Far from it. And, confession: I was as much part of that male jostling if not more so, as anyone else. I'm not some innocent party in this. The play/film captured some of that quite well. If anything though it could be more brutal than it showed and someone who is one moment on the receiving end, can easily be the person dishing it out later. There's some kind of mutual corruption goes on there. This too is part of 'education' of course.
Well, if a play/film gets you thinking, The History Boys certainly did that. As you can see, it got under my skin in uncanny ways.
Final comment added later:
Of course another way the play/film doesn't notice 'history' is in that even as they're talking about history, we don't see the history being enacted through there being no sight of all the other boys/girls going to schools or apprenticeships or work at that precise moment at the same time! What are all the other 18 year olds doing? One thing we learned through doing the 11-plus and going to grammar school (or could have learned if we didn't resist it) was to fear and despise those who went to Secondary Modern Schools, and envy those who went to private schools ('Public Schools). This was subtle, persistent, never-ending, often played out within families as well as between them, (one child going to the 'grammar', one to the 'sec mod', and even one going private and the others not. But socially and society-wide, the filtering, selecting, and segregating was (and is) going on throughout our schooling. As do the expectations, the style of education and indeed the content.
Though it's rarely admitted, the strange, inconsistent and historically odd way in which education is delivered to the whole cohort year by year produces what is in effect the horses for courses of a class society. However you describe the hierarchies or systems of control or systems of exploitation and class, you can find ways in which mostly (not entirely or always consistently) the school system has ended up matching it and helping to reproduce it. You can map on to society the different kinds of secondary schools, showing how more or less they do the job of making sure the round pegs go into the round holes and the square pegs go into the square holes.
