However, today I watched "The History Boys" (I have watched it at station B, with Chinese and English subtitles, the Chinese translation is "History Boys"). The background is that in 1986, a boys' school in a small town in Yorkshire, the ambitious principal wanted the best grades of the senior year to take the Oxford scholarship, and invited a substitute teacher to do a special test for the written test and interview of the famous school. training. There are several lines of conflict in the plot, the common homosexuality in the rotten boys' school, the sexual harassment of teachers by teachers, the contradiction between pragmatic education and liberal arts education, and the reflections caused by history and literature itself. Several lines are intertwined, complex but not messy, profound but not deliberate, sad but not sensational. Makes me think that studying liberal arts is still good.
In the final analysis, we are still human beings. After we have provided food and clothing, bought a house and a car, can travel abroad, can buy a famous brand bag, and can send our children to famous schools, we are still human, one by one, we can be happy and know Sadness, facing life and death, love and parting. And those things that are common to human nature can only be inspired by the best humanistic education. Even at the end of the world, we need humanistic education, which is the straw that lifts people out of suffering.
[Spoilers below]
One of my favorites is when the fat teacher Hector tells the students Posner about Hardy's poem Drummer Hodge in the classroom. At this time, Hector had just learned that he had been fired for sexually harassing students. He went into the classroom in a daze, but was unprepared to meet Posner, who was waiting for him to explain poetry. Posner recites the poem emotionally, describing the young drummer emerging from the English countryside and soon dying on the battlefield in South Africa, where he is buried, where the old poet portrays the waste of life, full of sentimentality. After reading, the teacher seemed to have not recovered from the bad news of being fired, and asked the students how they felt perfunctory. Students enthusiastically compared the poem's description of dying in a foreign land to another poem. At this time, the teacher seemed to slowly find the feeling, telling him why Hardy wrote better, telling him the historical background of the poem, telling him why the drummer in the poem has a name, and what the name means. Tell him why the word uncoffined is used to describe the dead, what the word means, the emotion the word conveys. The teacher didn't mention a single word about his mood at the time, but he clearly infected his students, bringing both him and the students into the emotion of the poem, and Hector said the following:
"The best moments in reading are when you come across something--a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things--that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe someone long dead. And, ... it's as if a hand...has come out... and taken yours."
When it comes to... it's as if a hand... has come out..., the teacher stretched out his hand as if to give it to the student, and the student was about to reach out to pick it up, but the teacher pulled it back,... . and taken yours, he put his hands on his chest. He is a teacher of sexually harassing students, and an amazing mentor, from the obscene to the sublime, the complexity of human nature, incisively and vividly.
Hector and Totti are old school teachers, a lot of knowledge is poured into it, and the children are smart enough to absorb knowledge like a sponge, absorb as much as you put in, history, poetry, French... . Irwin is a new school teacher. In the words of the children in the film, cutting-edge, forcing children to innovate, using knowledge as a ladder to inquire, not satisfied with copying knowledge and forcing them to innovate. This is the most intuitive way I have seen to express the difference between high school education and college education, or the difference between traditional college education and modern college education.
I also love their small class discussions, discussing the Holocaust, discussing what history is. Teachers ask questions, students answer, agree or disagree, go to the library after class to borrow a lot of books, go home and check books and write articles to support their views, and then teachers grade their articles. This is the essence of liberal arts education, using one soul to strike another soul, serious and serious thinking, my ideal seminar.
When visiting the historic site, everyone lined up for a group photo, but the fat teacher Hector was missing. He walked over slowly, saying as he went,
"Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you. But for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on."
I happened to be chatting during dinner the day before yesterday, talking about what my son did when he grew up. His father wanted him to be a scientist, and I said his science was not good enough, I'm afraid it would be too bad. Grandma said he could be a poet, but I said he would starve to death if he couldn't. Grandma said, it's okay, my sister grows up to earn money to support my brother. We all laughed, but my son said nothing. Later, his father asked him again and again, and he answered very seriously: "I want to be a teacher, and I want to pass on knowledge to future generations." He also emphasized: "I want to be a primary school teacher." I laughed because he was a kindergartener. When I said that I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, and so on, maybe I want to be a university teacher after I went to college, and it seems that it is not too far from our expectations for him. Then I saw this quote from Hector, and I realized I was the narrow one. Beyond individual successes and failures, he sees something far deeper. That's the game he wants to learn, to pass it on.
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