Reliving History

Last Sunday I went to the Ahmanson Theatre downtown to see The History Boys, and tonight I watched the movie again on cable. I remember seeing the film last year about this time at the Arclight. Hardly anyone else was in the movie theater, and the film itself got very little attention at the time (although I thought it was one of the best movies I saw last year). The play was somewhat well attended, but there were plenty of seats available and it was the last performance. And this for a production that won six Tony Awards.

I wonder if it's the subject matter that puts people off. It is about sexuality, of course, and I suspect the "ick factor" of a grown man, a teacher, who gropes his students (who, admittedly, put up with the groping out of their pity for someone they consider to be old and foolish) is just a bit too much for most people to bear. Certainly, it still makes me uncomfortable that even though the play is set in the 1980s, only one character (well, perhaps two) self-identifies as gay and he's pretty much a mess, falling in love with a straight boy who will never reciprocate and growing up to be just as sad and lonely as the teacher with repressed homosexual longings whose class he took years before.

Yet the play is about much more than sexuality, and that's the part that perhaps intrigues me more. It's a play about education and the ways that we learn. It's about conflicting ideologies and theories. One of the teachers, Hector, teaches in what appears to be a most haphazard way, letting his students re-enact scenes from old films, memorize poems, sing songs from the World War II era, even perform skits in French--using the subjunctive--about bordellos (even though he is an English teacher and the class is known as "general studies"). One begins to wonder what use all of this activity has, but of course, that is entirely his point. Education shouldn't be about usefulness or practicality. It should be for the development of a sensibility, a sensitivity, if you will. He tells Posner, the gay Jewish student from Sheffield, at one point: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something--a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things-- that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours." For Hector, education is about emotion, about feelings.

His rival , Irwin, treats education as if it were a game. He advocates that in taking the entrance exams for Cambridge and Oxford, the students make their answers interesting rather than factual, that they attempt to see history from an alternative perspective. He emphasizes the critical thinking aspect of education. Are we merely to accept the answers that are passed on to us--the best example in the play or film has to do with whether or not the Holocaust can be taught or even examined--or do we question the supposed "wisdom" of others? He even suggests that the information the boys glean from Hector's class (what he calls "gobbets") might be useful in helping them to get the interest of those reading their exams or those who are interviewing them for admission. A quote from Irwin illustrates his ideology: "But this is history. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it, this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be. . . even on the Holocaust." For Irwin, there are no "right" answers; there are no "facts" or "truth" in history. There is only the perspective on it that we are willing to present, and the more eccentric the interpretation, the better, it seems to him.

Of course, the headmaster has a completely different philosophy. He wants tangible results: students being accepted to prestigious universities, test scores, that sort of thing. What the boys do in Hector's class cannot be "quantified" and is, thus, of little or no use to him. That's why her hires Irwin, to help the boys "polish" themselves for the competitive admissions process. He reminds me of so many people in the academic world these days. Everything must be written down, and there must be a number attached to it to show some vague concept of "success."

Some of the best lines in the play (and film), I think, belong to the lone female voice, that of the history teacher, Dorothy Lintott. During a set of mock interviews, she assails the boys with the following: "Can you, for a moment, imagine how depressing it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude? . . . History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket." (She also gets one of my other favorite lines. In talking about her college days, she says, "Durham was very good for history. It's where I had my first pizza. Other things too, of course, but it's the pizza that stands out.") She takes a much more pragmatic view than either of the men or the headmaster, for that matter, in terms of her role as teacher.

I can't quite determine whose approach I most admire, and I think that's what I like about this play and film. The characters are complicated, not easily likeable, and the ideas they espouse are, at times, both enticing and foolhardy. Each time I see The History Boys, I wonder anew about my own teaching philosophy, the way that I attempt to teach. I'm not sure that it's as well defined as any one of those described above.

Maybe Rudge has it right all along. He's the rugby player who, in the midst of the mock interviews, describes history as "just one fucking thing after another."