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Passing Fails Them Where Failure Would Not

Deborah Stokol |
February 17, 2009 | 10:18 p.m. PST

Columnist
Deborah Stokol

I never thought I'd advocate for failure.

And by 'failure' I mean in school. In order to be held back. As a means to an ultimately more successful end.

It took watching The Class and reading UCLA said yes. Now, the Hard Part to really strengthen my resolve on this matter.

The first is a 2008 Palme d'Or winning, Oscar-nominated French film, the second, a piece the Los Angeles Times published a little more than two weeks ago.

Both reinforced in me the idea that students incapable of
demonstrating a fundamental command of the material covered that year
should not be permitted to pass on to the next level. That kind of laissez-faire, look-the-other-way teaching inhibits the students' ability to best participate in the world around them--let alone meet their "potential."

And though these are but two discrete pieces, one dealing with education in France, the other with an isolated incident in a San Pedro High School and elite public university, they can just as easily function as stand-ins for high schools and colleges, or even middle and elementary schools, around the world.

In his inauguration speech, Obama mentioned our "schools fail too many," and I'd like to mention that they fail too many by passing most. Here's the bottom line: if you can't read or write, if you have learned little to nothing during a whole academic year and if you cannot functionally speak your country's language, you shouldn't be allowed to get to the next grade.

Cast with students rather than actors, based on a novel and screenplay by real-life teacher Francois Begaudeau, Laurent Cantet's
film presents itself, if not as an out-and-out documentary, then as a
reconstructed glimpse into the fraught student-teacher tensions within
a quotidian French classroom at an unnamed school over the course of a
year.

In other words, the movie delivers celluloid versions of class sessions
as Begaudeau (who goes far from easy on himself) experienced them. But
if the film's aim in so doing is to share a truth with those not able
to experience it first hand, then the truth it reveals is bleak indeed.

Phantom students in this classroom, the audience voyeuristically
witnesses two poles, each trying to gain more leverage, both unlikable.
The students are rude, malicious and disruptive, the teacher petty,
argumentative and condescending.

Rather than establishing himself as the authority figure, the teacher
responds to each critical quip of his chalkboard examples with barbs of
his own. When students speak out of turn, he engages them in discourse
that brings him down to the 14-year-old level rather than elevating the
students to a higher, more mature one themselves. When a snide girl, one who had
not given him any sass-related problems the year before, refuses to do
the assignments, he confronts her, asking the generally unqualified
question "what happened to you over the summer?" in a tone abrasive
enough to make it sound like a slap in the face.

There's nothing wrong with him taking her aside or even doling out some
sort of punishment, but he seems unable to communicate with younger
individuals not from his race and not from his socioeconomic class
in a way that would both instill respect while drawing them out. He
reprimands the girl, Kumba, in front of her two friends, which he does
not seem to realize would not simply make her less willing to feel
contrite but also far more likely to exhibit a proud,
insubordinatory spirit in order to impress her classmates.

He undermines himself: neither kind nor effectively a disciplinarian,
he is simply a talker. And yet as much as he glibly, childishly
responds to each of their inappropriate questions ("are you gay?" "No.
Are you satisfied?"), not thinking that a non-answer would better
remind them that he is an elder and their teacher, he also contradicts
himself by both patronizing and insulting those same students. When he
calls them a demeaning term he does not seem to know the current
meaning behind, his only defense is to say "teachers can speak to
students in a way that students may not do in return." Facing the
question "how do you spell Lafayette station?" he responds with "why do
you want to know? And how is it that you've been to the center of
Paris?" not thinking the students capable of moving a few train stops
beyond their microcosmic world.

But the most perturbing moment, the one most eliciting this response, occurs in the penultimate scene of the film. The year
has ended, and the students have finally seen the school act like a
school and expel one of the more gravely insolent, disruptive teens. The
remaining students appear to have begun treating the teacher with
respect and have rounded out the year by explaining to him what they've
each learned.

One of the girls--a student the viewer has not until then even seen--bashfully stays behind to talk to the teacher. Looking him in the eye, she tells him she has
learned literally nothing that year. She admits this not to spite, but to confide in him. Worried she will eventually be sent to trade school, this confession is a plea for some manner of redress. That she could have said something earlier is, at this point, moot. There is no reason to allow her to move on to the next year. Her revelation
should demonstrate that while he was engaging in petty arguments with
loud students, he was also, without even noticing, leaving behind this quiet
girl who was--just as quietly--absorbing nothing. But he simply reacts with slight surprise and mild
disbelief. Not visibly distressed, though, he asks her a few questions then lets her go without any clear further thought.

Following the acceptance into UCLA of an undocumented Mexican-born girl, Karina De La Cruz, UCLA said yes. Now, the Hard Part reminds me of that scene if only in the manner in which it emphasizes, again, that apathy can, at the end, be one of the worst disservices paid a student.

"I could never make sense of the language
and only understood half the things people said," she wrote in her college essay, according to the article. Yet she got in. Never mind
that because she is undocumented, financial aid cannot help her pay for
tuition. Never mind that she was accepted to Cal State Long
Beach, which would save her money and a two-and-a-half
hour daily trip to UCLA. What troubled me most was that a large university in
which her linguistic needs could easily be ignored would accept someone
with remedial English, and worse, that her high school would graduate a student in that shape.

What kind of favor do either San Pedro High or UCLA do her, if they
simply turn away from the fact that she, though intelligent, cannot
speak English? Do they pass her in the hopes that the problem will somehow
fix itself?

Until schools
themselves address these issues by holding back students until they've proven themselves ready to graduate, the institutions will have allowed life to pass them by.



 

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