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Between the Walls
The Wire’s Ed Burns and French author Francois Begaudeau depict the challenges and rewards of modern urban education
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The topic of public education is a lightening rod for opinion. Every citizen has an idea of what a classroom should look like. Thanks to people who have been there, like Ed Burns, a former Baltimore public school teacher and writer for The Wire, and French author Francois Begaudeau, we get a glimpse inside. In his 2006 novel Entre les Murs (Between the Walls), Francois Begaudeau depicted a year in a Parisian junior high classroom. He then helped adapt the book into a screenplay and, the resulting film, billed in the US as The Class, took the Palme d’Or prize at Cannes this year.
The Class is not a documentary, but a fictionalized version of Begaudeau’s experiences teaching. Life and art meet in the casting, with the writer playing himself and many of the students played by children from a Parisian junior high. Begaudeau has the kind of biography conducive to thoughtful films like The Class. He’s been a rock musician, film critic, public school teacher, novelist and now screenwriter and actor.
The students of The Class exemplify urban Paris: African, Asian, Arab and European. The story keeps with the perspective of the teacher, not allowing us to leave the building. Without knowledge of the kids’ home or social lives, the audience sees only what a teacher would.
Director Laurent Cantet chose a filming process that accurately reflects a classroom always edging around chaos. Three cameras were present at workshops: one on the teacher, one on the children most active in a scene and another capturing whispers, eye rolls and other high jinks. Watching clips and previews, I was struck by the energy in the shots, a feeling of teetering on the brink in a room full of teenagers in which the balance of power is so tenuous. The film shows the difficultly of free and open discourse among a diverse group of kids who view the teacher warily, as an authority figure and representative of a class of society very different from their own.
The urban public classroom is a source of fascination, and we all rightly feel that we have a stake in it. The Class shows that these social petri dishes are crucial to a working and evolving democracy. A teacher can help children learn to think critically, question assumptions and engage in their community. But time is short and the process imperfect. Once the bell rings, a teacher watches children file out into another reality. Even an individual committed to energizing and educating children of various ethnic and economic backgrounds lives with the fact that the school day is just a small portion of their students’ very complicated lives.