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The History Boys: A Play by Alan Bennett
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Alan Bennett Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published) Published: 2006-04-04 ISBN: 0571224644 Number of pages: 144 Publisher: Faber & Faber Product features:
Book Reviews of The History Boys: A PlayBook Review: Whither education? Summary: 4 StarsThe History Boys is a fascinating if flawed play about history teaching and the value of education in schools and society. Set in a dated grammar school with an Oxbridge scholarship class of bright boistrous boys cramming for places at Britain's elite universities, it uncovers many shibboleths of old fashioned educational piety.
A results obsessed headmaster, despairing of his general studies teacher Hector ploughing his very unique educational furrow consisting of classic poetry and groping of boys genitals, hires the young Turk Irwin to galvanise his young 6th form charges into Oxbridge material. Irwin whips the boys into exam technique shape using the maverick 'turn established wisdom on its head' essay school where counter-intuitive ideas and generalised themes trump steadily learned facts as the key to impress the examiners.
I am a history teacher myself and was fascinated by the multi layered themes of the play. A debate about history education first up. Bennett reveals in his introduction that he despairs of certain contemporary TV dons (Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts primarily) who have made a lucrative career from applecart upsetting history. Valuing shock over 'romantic truth'. But Bennett's diagnosis here is misleading. By voicing this school of history with the unsympathetic Irwin: 'who cares about truth?', he does rough justice to a school of history which is determined to challenge the assumptions of the past in order to arrive at a clear, rigorously argued version of human doings rather than passively accept hackneyed old truths, which, given the truth of the past is so notoriously difficult to arrive at, might not be so true anyway.
Secondly the play is a musing on the whole value of education. The end (and this is more pointed in the film version) reveals the boys all make their primary goal - a place at Oxford or Cambridge. But then what? As Ms Lintott, the boys' third teacher, a quiet calm plodder of the old school remarks, they are pillars of an establishment with no place for pillars. In Britain's current era of post-imperial decline, what use is being well educated when the pillars of our society are philistinistic ego-maniacs like Alan Sugar, Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan. The 'well rounded individual' is increasingly pushed to the margins - to eke out a non-descript existince in one of our diminishing universities, or schools, or become a crabbed and bitter newspaper columnist carping from the sidelines.
The play's tone is one of melancholy, though the the balance is upset by too much slathering on of one of Alan Bennett's erstwhile themes - young boys and homosexuality. There is much to ponder here about a way of life and education that has passed. It is hard to argue against the contention that what has succeeded it represents a significant epoch of cultural decline.
Summary of The History Boys: A Play"A play of depth as well as dazzle, intensely moving as well as thought-provoking and funny." -The Daily Telegraph ? An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form (or senior) boys in a British boys' school are, as such boys will be, in pursuit of sex, sport, and a place at a good university, generally in that order. In all their efforts, they are helped and hindered, enlightened and bemused, by a maverick English teacher who seeks to broaden their horizons in sometimes undefined ways, and a young history teacher who questions the methods, as well as the aim, of their schooling. In The History Boys, Alan Bennett evokes the special period and place that the sixth form represents in an English boy's life. In doing so, he raises-with gentle wit and pitch-perfect command of character-not only universal questions about the nature of history and how it is taught but also questions about the purpose of education today. ?
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