From the new Netflix series Adolescence (dir. Philip Barantini). DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) are investigating a crime. They’re talking outside a school where at least some teachers walk in and out of classrooms as they please while the kids watch movies.
DI Frank speaks first:
“There'll be some good teachers in here and some good students. My school was a bit like this.”Adolescence is harrowing stuff. It begins with the story of one thirteen-year-old boy and opens out into a much wider exploration of youth culture. We’re two (of four) episodes in. After the first episode, I realized that I had not moved a muscle while watching. I had to get up and walk around.
“Well, how did you survive then?”
“’Cause I had a good teacher. I had Mrs. Benton, who was fucking class. She taught art and photography. I liked drawing pictures and stuff.”
“Mmm. Nice.”
“All kids really need is one thing that makes them feel okay about themselves.”
[Post title from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, in which the one thing said to be needful for schoolchildren is “Facts.”]
comments: 6
That one teacher.
Reminds me of
“ It was at P.S. 24 that Baldwin met Orilla "Bill" Miller, a young white schoolteacher from the Midwest whom Baldwin named as one of the reasons that he "never really managed to hate white people". Among other outings, she took Baldwin to see an all-Black rendition of ‘Macbeth’, from which flowed Baldwin's lifelong desire to succeed as a playwright.”
—Wikipedia, “James Baldwin “
I think I should already know about Orilla Miller, but I don’t. There’s a picture of Baldwin with her and her husband, also some commentary at The Paris Review.
That school was in the bottom 10% of British schools. The whole thing is wildly too much, especially the last episode, which feels like more a reflection of how London perceives northerners.
Some of the episodes are good but the filmmaker is using this as a springboard to try to get under 16s banned from owning phones. This is meant to cause a moral panic. I fear it may succeed.
I thought the final episode evinced great compassion for a family in crisis, grieving, falling apart, but also showing great resilience. I didn’t find anything in the Miller family that someone would be expected to look down on.
I’m not keen on the idea of banning phone ownership. Keeping phones out of classrooms? Not a bad idea. (I speak as a retired college prof.) But it’s not just phones: it’s what young people left to their own devices (pun not intended) can absorb online. Jamie was in his room on a computer with the door closed long after he should have been asleep, right?
essayist Paul Graham speculated that maybe digital is so new that society hasn't evolved any anti-bodies yet. Not like how, if you spend breakfast to past lunch on the couch watching the boob tube, little alarms go off to say, "Get started with your day."
(Say, nobody's saying 'smart idiot phone' or 'boob phone'—maybe nothing easily rhymes)
I suppose anti-bodies would have to start with the middle of society's bell curve: the grown ups. Besides other tactics, we could start sharing things like, "I've been on the device too much" and "at fitness class I left my phone in my car, so I wouldn't go to the wall and check it."
Anti-bodies: that’s a great metaphor. Placing the phone so it’s not at hand, limiting the time for apps — also forms of self-administered anti-bodies.
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