LICC - Connecting with Culture - The history boys

LICC - Connecting with Culture - The history boys

Alan Bennett's new play (at the Lyttleton Theatre) is about - to use Tony Blair's famous phrase - education, education, education. It is set in a northern grammar school in the 1980s. The headmaster (with a geography degree from Hull) is determined that his brightest boys should win places at Oxford or Cambridge. The maverick sixth-form master, Hector, has a sparkling rapport with the boys, and his classes are eccentric, stimulating, eclectic, creative, poetic. The head is concerned, however, that Hector's teaching is 'unpredictable and unquantifiable'. So, he hires for a few weeks a young teacher with the express brief to train the boys to write the kind of essays that will impress the examiners with their apparent originality. The cynical shallowness of the one contrasts vividly with the passion of the other.

Sparks fly.

The background to the plot is Margaret Thatcher's obsession with utilitarianism. The long shadows of league tables were yet to fall over our schools. The essential question that the play asks is, 'What is education for?' Is it for the imparting of skills and qualifications that will help students to productive careers? Or is it something much less easily measured - the forming of truly rounded human beings, with wide knowledge and questioning minds?
In contemporary discussion about education, Christians seem passionately concerned about religious-education, multi-faith worship and the teaching of evolution. But we do not often hear a Christian voice about the purpose and content of the whole education our children receive. Do we care about the abandonment of any sense of history - indeed of the wisdom and learning of the past; about the denigration of culture; or about the secular worldview that is so much taken for granted that it is not even discussed?

Perhaps we could do better in our churches, too. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were reminded constantly to recall the great events of their history. But many Christians today seem ignorant of the 2,000 years of the history of the Church. To say nothing of the sublime poetry and music that have so enriched our Christian heritage. Bennett's play offers a timely lesson for us all. It's truly an education.

Helen Parry

the question that the play asks is, 'What is education for?' Bennett's play offers a timely lesson for us all"

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