School days = Happy days? True or False?

Despite the breezy nostalgia for the carefree days of youth, stories set in schools are generally dark and cruel. Is there a lesson to be drawn from that mismatch?

Last Thursday I shared a seating bay on a rush hour train with three schoolgirls. When the train pulled out of the station they began to play ‘I Spy’ until one remarked that you couldn’t pick an object outside while the train was moving. After a quick scroll through their phones for games to play on the DART they chose ‘Twenty Questions’.

  Ok, who am I thinking of?

  Is it a girl?

  Yes?

  Does she have blue hair?

  No.

  Does she have a tattoo on her arm?

  No.

  Is she always posting mad photos of herself on Insta?

  Yes.

  Is she with Jamie?

  Noooooo.

  Wait wait. I know . . .

Killiney Bay with DART line at the base of the hill

  They were having such a laugh they didn’t notice the train had halted between stations, much less heed the driver’s announcement that a truck had rammed the level crossing ahead. Only when we were reversing did they clock that there was something amiss.

  Hang on, said one, what’s happening?

  As the adult in the bay I repeated the driver’s message and said we’d all have to get out at the previous station and take buses home.

  After a few mild curses they resumed their game.

Three days before that encounter I saw a production of Punk Rock (2009) by Simon Stephens at the Lir National Academy of Dramatic Art. The main action of the play occurs in the library in a private school in Manchester where seven pupils come and go, supposedly revising for their mock A-levels (school-leaving exams). The cast, being in their early twenties, created their roles with an energy that made the quips and cruelty all the more real.

Like the girls on the train, Stephens’ characters are intent on themselves, quick to criticise the one who has left the room or not yet arrived. This clique is disrupted by the arrival of an enigmatic new girl, Lilly. With a touch of hostility, the boys swagger while the girls challenge her, more intent on impressing each other than Lilly. One shows off by bullying two others. A third, William, fancies Lilly, who is, unbeknownst to him, involved with another boy.   

Mural of the Derry Girls in Derry

Writers have long been drawn to the school environment, from Dickens in Dotheboys Hall (Nicholas Nickleby, 1839) to Lisa McGee, writer of Derry Girls (2018-22). Many popular examples feature an unconventional and charismatic teacher, from Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) to Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2004), Peter Weir’s film, Dead Poets Society (1989), and François Bégaudeau’s novel and film The Class (Entre les Murs, 2006 and 2008 respectively). The first three, like Punk Rock, are set in elite schools, the latter in a school in a deprived mixed neighbourhood in Paris.

The closed system of the school provides the writer with unity of time and space, and most of us have done time there, for better or worse, making the context readily identifiable. We have also, all been seventeen. As a microcosm of society the schools in the examples above offer a relatively safe space where the maverick (Jean Brodie, Hector, John Keating) can win popularity by taking a genuine interest in the students and challenging the status quo. In some cases a fine line divides this amusing eccentricity from manipulation and even abuse of the students.  

Beyond those obvious features there is an innate interest in the behaviour of the students when they are left to their own devices, away from the teachers. In William Golding’s famous Lord of the Flies (1954) the marooned boys establish rival factions with a catastrophically violent ending. The same is true of Punk Rock where the library is isolated from the school. Although we hear of one respected teacher, Mr. Lloyd, he remains off stage but his sudden death precipitates the final violence. Here, in the library the students argue, goad and attempt to seduce one another.

Punk Rock has been compared to the films If . . . . (Lindsay Anderson, 1969) and Elephant (Gus van Sant, 2003). The nerdy William, who talks at Lilly rather than to her, and whom she initially pities, anticipates the character of Oliver Quick in the 2023 campus film Saltburn in that both are self-dramatising psychopaths. Interesting recurrence. Part of the fascination of the privileged school setting, is, I think, that it grants writers the freedom to plausibly have their characters, high on hormones, hopes and chemicals, voice anger and ambitions without the interference of tiresome reality.

In another classic, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) by Alain-Fournier, the ‘hero’, a new boy, older and more brazen than the narrator and his classmates, fascinates them, particularly when he talks of stumbling on a mysterious castle and a beautiful girl. Unusually, we follow the adult outworkings of this fantasy and witness Meaulnes continue to behave like a child, incapable of an adult relationship with the rediscovered Yvonne.

Trinity College Library used in the Harry Potter films

One of the nerdier characters in Punk Rock, Chadwick, maintains his cool in the face of considerable bullying, and, as the climax of the play approaches, delivers a withering speech about our insignificance in the scale of the universe. He can see past the bully to a truth outside the walls of the school, and is the only one to escape the brutal finale. Herein lies the other part of the equation. While the schooldays portrayed in fiction are rarely happy, youth breeds optimism and the audience or reader longs for the students to escape their incestuous environment. They too long to spread their wings, like Stephen Dedalus, whose schooling is notoriously cruel, at the end of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). This aspiration is, in turn, tempered by the vulnerability and impressionability of the students.

Who has not at some point thought if they had those days to live over again they would choose differently? That reflection opens a further dimension of the setting: the school as a crossroads. Absent children’s stories, such as the Harry Potter series, the students in the adult works are usually at the point of leaving school and face decisions about what next. In The Class the teacher, Marin’s, ambitions for his pupils are denigrated by the apathy of his colleagues, stuck in a system that will never favour their disadvantaged pupils. Despite his efforts, the students say they have learnt nothing, because education has no meaning for them.

For all the anarchy and novelty of the unorthodox teachers in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Dead Poets Society and The History Boys, the conservative authority figures, school principals, win the day, and the students, or those who survive, move into the conventional mainstream. This is the fantasy outlined, with some irony, to a psychiatrist by William at the end of Punk Rock. The surviving boys in Lord of the Flies are rescued by an appalled naval officer. The rebellion is short and brutal but the class is called to order at the end. 

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As ever I’d love to receive your thoughts on What’s the Story? and, specifically this week, on your school days, happy, sad, instructive or otherwise!