Hi LindyBill; The Emperor's Club movie review.
I went to see The Emperor's Club last night and while it was a reasonably amusing movie, I was very disappointed in the way it treated education.
If you don't like having movie endings spoiled for you, do stop reading now.
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The hero of the movie is a pedantic instructor at a small boys school. He teaches the ancients with the intention of instilling morality into his students. In this he is less than 100% effective, of course, LOL. Of this much I approve, and I agree wholeheartedly in the advantages of the study of the writings of the ancients. But his teaching methods! He teaches for 35 years and he is still teaching in exactly the same manner in 2001 as in 1976. The implications of this are horrible. Was his teaching so perfect in 1976, that he could not improve upon it? One scene in the movie, where he attempts to write a book but fails for writer's block, suggests that he simply was insufficiently imaginative.
But what's worse is the nature of the test that is the focal point of the movie. After implying that the ancients are being studied in order to better understand morality and the nature of government, the students in the competition are instead pelted with simple questions that are more reminiscent of a Jeopardy game show than serious study. For God's sake! "Which of the eight earlyl Caesars are not included in this list?" My instinct to shout out the answer (g) was overcome by the horror of this kind of rote memorization.
Far from influencing a younger generation to study the classics, the truth was, as was stated by an ex student in the banquet 25 years later, that the instructor forced his students to learn the material whether they wanted to or not.
My experience in the study of military history in High School was of a completely different calibre. My instructor was as enthusiastic, or more, than the one in Emperor's Club, but the primary vehicle in the class was book reports. We were required to read a fairly large number of books (I think it was a dozen), and to write book reports on them.
From that experience, I achieved a life-long love of military history though I admit to reading a few before I took that class. (And of course I also ended up with about a 20-year hatred of writing book reports.)
As soon as an instructor makes it clear that his motivation is to improve the moral life of his students he will lose the ones that require this beneficiation. Humans resist teaching, and above all they resist moral teaching. Instead, simply give the bare facts of who did what to whom, and how they are now thought of. The lessons should be implicit in the material not explicit. A good example of how this is done is the best seller "Book of Virtues" by William Bennett, though he'd have done better by titling it "Book of Stories", LOL:
search.barnesandnoble.com
-- Carl
P.S. Somehow this seems appropriate for an Ayn Rand thread. Also, moviegowers: Do try to avoid shouting out the answers to questions in movies. The people who are slower than you won't appreciate it. |
