Word: classing
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...does: A man named François Marin (François Bégaudeau) teaches - or tries to teach - French to 14- and 15-year-old students in a coldly modern school in Paris. His classroom is not quite a blackboard jungle, but it does contain a marginally middle-class, ethnically mixed, psychologically fractious group of kids, who constantly challenge him with their lolling indifference, their angry outbursts, their perpetual edge-of-insolence attitudes. To be honest, we do not witness very many heartwarming pedagogical triumphs in director Laurent Cantet's The Class, which tracks the activities of Marin...
...that he also wrote. It is hard to think of another film more tightly autobiographical than this one. It's even harder to think of other films that build so gripping a narrative out of a string of comparatively minor and disparate incidents. For its first few minutes The Class threatens to be just as boring as you probably remember high school to have been. But then one girl, previously one of Marin's better students, refuses to read aloud from a book and then angrily refuses to make a genuine apology to him in an after-class confrontation. From...
...righteousness in him, bordering on arrogance, that can be tough to take. He is not exactly Mr. Chips. On the other hand, the film makes it obvious that eccentric, sweet-souled, old-school schoolmasters would last about five minutes in a modern high school - and not only in working-class Paris, where every day presents its minor melodramatic possibilities and generally realizes them...
...perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Class is its conclusion. After all the edgy incidents it offers, when we come to the last day of school, the students are hard-pressed to recall anything useful or even memorable that they learned. They have, in effect, been babysat, kept off the streets. We gain the strongest impression of the education machinery taking a little rest before clanking onward, in the largest sense indifferent to the needs of its charges, the best efforts of its functionaries. We guess that the smart kids will come out all right finally. We also guess...
...professor at Georgetown University, also sees parallels in the way the two groups are organized and the fact that they both began to pursue a utopian yet undefined vision of a future society. Like the leaders of the RAF, al-Qaeda's leaders come largely from educated, middle-class backgrounds and in their desire to correct what they see as long-standing injustices, both groups embrace violence. "Both give a wider, productive focus to the individual's frustration of not being able to affect policy through normal channels," Hoffman says. "For young people looking for discipline and a focus...