Nick Hornby’s Oscar-nominated film, An Education, seems at first to have a misleading name. After all, the central character struggles with Latin, is discouraged from French and gives up a very privileged education for an older man, who turns out to be married. Thankfully, in both film and in real life, the protagonist – the impressive journalist and theatre critic Lynn Barber – learns her lesson. Barber gets into Oxford and then the rest, as they say, is history.
When we first tried to get children to watch An Education at FILMCLUB (an after-school club that shows quality films to over 200 000 children a week), it was greeted with great scepticism. Who wants to watch a film with that title, when this is one precious time in the school day that might actually avoid education? But now the story of Barber turning her back on education is helping hundreds of thousands of children to rediscover the importance of their own.
Lindsay Mackie and I first set out to put film into the lives of school children in 2006. Our initial pilot of just 25 schools has grown and – with the support of the Department of Education, Love Film and the film industry – it has become a permanent feature in 6000 schools, with more asking to join every day.
‘Some of my pupils don’t go off the street where they live, so their education is a real task for us … What we do through our film club is discuss and rate the films, and their imagination is fired. They are getting experiences outside of their everyday lives. The art of discussion has improved and the breadth of language used has been enhanced by the variety of films watched.’ – Janice Middleton, Edlington Victoria Primary School
Throughout the process of forming and running FILMCLUB, I have been struck by how powerful the act of watching a film is for our members. When the kids watched Gandhi they were outraged that a man was prevented from sitting in a first class train carriage because of his colour. It transformed a group of children who preferred to keep quiet into a group who needed to have their opinion heard. Their sudden increase in knowledge of the history of Indian Independence was quieter but no less dramatic.
During the General Election, many schools showed Mr Smith Goes to Washington – the story of a small man who takes on a corrupt political elite with only the help of a beautiful secretary and a copy of the American constitution. It generated a great deal of debate about what we might call “social responsibility,” among 14-year-olds. The Truman Show garnered such a sophisticated and positive response that our members started working their way back through director Peter Weir’s filmography. This unearthed another firm favourite of FILMCLUB in Dead Poets Society, a joint celebration of good teaching and the poetry of Walt Whitman.
Once they’ve caught onto it all, FILMCLUB members go willingly from It’s a Wonderful Life, to the heartbreaking French film The Choir. They watch Hotel Rwanda, Schindler’s List and Trading Places, and then talk with their teachers, their friends and their families about community, choir music, abuse, friendship, genocide, the Second World War, and the city. While FILMCLUB does not do much for pupils’ arithmetic, our teachers report measurable improvements in the reading writing and formal argument among FILMCLUB members. Interestingly, they also report there is more happiness and willingness, improvement behaviour and greater engagement in school life.
We were not surprised – because we have experienced the power of the cinema ourselves. How many of us have extended our knowledge – whether of the Vietnam War or the life story of Jackson Pollack – from the cinema? What really took us aback wasn’t their joy at watching films but how it affects other parts of their lives. Head teachers immediately saw their pupils extending their general knowledge and growing in confidence, analytical thinking and literacy – and that it was all pouring backing into the core curriculum. They have become the backbone of FILMCLUB support.
‘My experience as a head teacher in Tower Hamlets over the last 20 years has been overwhelmingly that we do two things: we try to improve the quality of the experience in the classroom and we try to enrich the quality of the experiences outside the classroom. That has a double benefit. The first is that those experiences themselves have a value and the second is that it encourages young people to want to be in school, to buy into the core business and to gain “educational capital”. Organisations like FILMCLUB are right there at the forefront.’ – Sir Alasdair MacDonald, Morpeth School
Since, by definition, all school-age children have been brought up in a visual multimedia culture, it’s not surprising that the world of studious reading that defined our childhood is further from their experience than ever. Rather than bemoaning this evident truth, we must grab pupils though what is familiar to them, and use it to map a route to an informed, enquiring and educated mind. By the time they have found out that films are not only to entertain but also make up some of the finest artistic achievements of last 100 years, they have already been exposed to the idea of learning, already been in touch with important concepts, already learned about places and people and history. And, as FILMCLUB has proven, they are keen to express themselves, to write and talk about what they have seen.
I can’t say that being a member of FILMCLUB could stop any single girl from taking the path that the Lynn Barber character does in An Education. But I do know that being shown the film provoked quite a spell, most particularly in the teenage girls, amongst whom the glamour of speaking in French was understood, and the value of a traditional education widely promoted.
Beeban Kidron is the director of, amongst other films, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. She is also the cofounder of FILMCLUB.
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