The History Boys sss
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The hypocritical willingness to argue a point either way lies at the heart of The History Boys, an excellent British drama adapted by Alan Bennett (The Madness of King George) from his celebrated play. The movie takes place in 1983 at a boys’ boarding school in Yorkshire, where the grasping headmaster (Clive Merrison) is delighted to learn that eight young history scholars in the sixth form (equivalent to high school seniors) have scored exceptionally well on their A-Level exams (equivalent to the SATs) and may distinguish the school by getting into Oxford or Cambridge. Unwilling to leave anything to chance, he hires a young Oxford graduate to drill his prize pupils for their college entrance exams. Mr. Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a slick rhetorician, has mastered the sort of intellectual smoke and mirrors that impresses bored university dons. But as the school year progresses he finds himself in conflict with the boys’ portly, retirement-age English teacher, Mr. Hector (Richard Griffiths).
Hector has been assigned to teach the boys General Studies, a “waste of time” that he heartily endorses. His unstructured class is less like school than an evening at the pub: when the boys aren’t listening to him recite poetry, they’re acting out scenes from old movies for him to identify, or singing Rodgers and Hart songs at the piano, or conversing with him in French as they act out a visit to a brothel. Hector endorses A.E. Housman’s line that “all knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.” More to the point, Hector understands that knowledge can have uses later in life that we might not anticipate. When one of the boys complains that most poetry is about things that haven’t happened to them yet, Hector replies, “It will. And then you will have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you’re dying. We’re making your deathbeds here, boys.”
