Talking in Class
In what is becoming a habit of parenthood, I caught Laurent Cantet’s wildly acclaimed The Class this weekend, several months after it came out. I thought as a dramatic exercise it was often stunning, but, still, it left me a little confused. The Class (Entre les Murs) is basically a year in the class of Francois, teacher of French to a multicultural batch of teenagers. I think the film’s take on the Francois’ teaching approach is one of general approval – his faculty antagonists are clearly not as sympathethically portrayed – although this approach, it seems obvious to me, is the real culprit in the mini-tragedy that drives the second half of the film. This is my one problem with the film, that it focuses on heroic efforts to reach hard-to-reach students undertaken by a really terrible teacher. Francois uses a toxic combination of new and old educational models. His affective stance towards his students is the traditional, antagonistic one immortalized in Truffaut’s 400 Blows. He badgers sarcastically. He zeroes in on uncertainty and picks at it. He tries to expose weakness. But his method comes from the more newfangled model of the “child-centered” classroom. (I have no idea how far this thinking has infiltrated French educational practice, but it has definitely infiltrated Cantet’s film.) He luridly prods students to open up about their feelings on such topics as “shame” (i.e. tell us what you’re ashamed of; come on, tell us). He erases the status difference between teacher and student, rarely asserting authority but lowering himself to bicker over small provocations, even once claiming betrayal by a pair of girl students who have talked behind his back, by confronting them in a courtyard crowded with other students, who gather round – it’s like he’s just one of the kids, a typical teenager, insecure and overwrought, a bit of a drama queen. His overriding classroom goal seems not to teach his students but rather to provoke them and keep them talking. He’s one part therapist, one part dickish older brother. His ministrations are, thus, not just ineffectual but creepy. The Class is in many ways a remarkable film, but as it went on I found myself thinking, “I think I understand Foucault a little better now.”
Haven’t seen the movie, but from my experience teaching ESL in a foreign country, getting students to talk and keep talking is just about the most valuable thing a teacher can do.
— salacious · May 4, 09:07 AM · #
Maybe I should have been clearer that this is French class along the lines of English class in American schools. The kids are already fluent in French (with one exception ). They’re supposed to be learning the useless categories of traditional grammar.
— Matt Feeney · May 4, 04:37 PM · #
An excerpt from my movie review in The American Conservative:
“The Class,” a slice-of-life drama tracking a year in an inner city Parisian junior high school, has been greeted rapturously, winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. The critical acclaim stems mostly from “The Class” not being Hilary Swank’s 2007 “Freedom Writers” or all those other tiresome Nice White Lady movies in which heroic teachers overcome “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and turn their charges into Nobel Laureates. In contrast, this French film offers a refreshingly realistic depiction of the frustrations of teaching. It’s not wholly plausible—as in all school movies, there is only a single class in “The Class”—but it’s almost unique in suggesting that student quality matters. “The Class” is based on an autobiographical novel by schoolteacher François Bégaudeau. In the manner of WWII hero Audie Murphy, who played himself in the film version of his memoir “To Hell and Back,” Bégaudeau portrays a teacher named M. Marin. “The Class” could be called “To Heck and Back” because “inner city” doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Paris as it does in Detroit. The French like their cities, so the riotous public housing projects are out in Paris’s dreary suburbs. The Parisian 14-year-olds in “The Class” aren’t gun-packing gangbangers, as in Hollywood movies. They’re just mouthy adolescents, lazy, not terribly bright, and full of ressentiment at the dominance of elitist French culture. M. Marin’s French literature class is half-French and half-minority, with the unrulier Muslims, black and white, absorbing most of his attention. The smartest and most respectful student is a Chinese immigrant, while the worst troublemaker is Souleymane from Mali in sub-Saharan Africa. One well-spoken lad who hopes to win admission to the elite Lycée Henri IV goes largely ignored in the turmoil caused by his less intelligent classmates, who constantly monitor whether they are being disrespected, so they can get off task. Griping about being dissed is more fun than being forced to reveal to the other kids that they can’t do the work. Marin banters with them, but he’s too genteel to thrive amidst all the dominance struggles. Now in his fifth year, Marin is no longer an idealist. When a naive colleague suggests that Marin should assign Voltaire’s Candide, he demurs, “The Enlightenment will be tough for them.” Marin tries to get the class to read The Diary of Anne Frank instead (which, in “Freedom Writers,” turns teacher Erin Gruwell’s slum students into prodigies of literary creativity), but it mostly annoys Marin’s heavily Muslim class.— Steve Sailer · May 4, 07:33 PM · #