I’m glad no one took my blood pressure as I watched “The Class,” for it would have been soaring. The movie – which takes place almost completely inside a high school on the edge of Paris – is great (as nearly all reviewers agree). So it wasn’t the quality of the film that nearly gave me a stroke.
I’d done two site visits that day, watching WritersCorps teaching artists share poetry with San Francisco teen-agers – kids who had a lot in common with those in the movie – and at first I felt I was on another site visit. Most of the teens in the movie (or their parents) had come from elsewhere – Morocco, Mali, China, the Caribbean. Most were lively, bright, curious and insistent. They probably had more skills, and were more willing to get down to work, than many of our students, but the two groups of young people shared a lot.
There’s much to be said about the adults in the movie, the ways they speak to each other in the teachers’ lounge, and about school policies and how these were implemented. One of the particulars that was so great about the film was getting to witness all this, as though in a Frederick Wiseman documentary (another observation made by many reviewers).
But what did my blood pressure in was the teacher whose class was “The Class.” This teacher was played by François Bégaudeau, who wrote the autobiographical novel on which the movie is based and who himself had been a teacher in a school similar to the one portrayed. The good news is that François wasn’t a “white savior teacher” – this wasn’t that kind of movie. The bad news is how profoundly he let his students down.
I could go on and on about the details of this “let down” – all the ways the teacher did not listen to what the teen-agers tried (generously, it seemed to me) to tell him about what was important to them, about their cultures, about himself, and about power. Instead I’ll let you see the movie for yourself.
But please watch the climax scene closely. Please note how François, embarrassed by his students calling him out, lets one of those students (who, aware of his anger, wisely tries to leave the classroom) take the fall.
Please watch carefully, too, the penultimate scene. Notice how that student speaks so deeply from her heart, and how the teacher replies with platitudes.
I ask you to watch closely because I’ve been shocked – in reading reviews – how many threw up their hands at the kids, or the multicultural reality, or the Failure of the Education System.
We at WritersCorps loved the French students, though, so much like our students. And we were angry, sad, or disappointed at all the ways their teacher failed them.
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