A Thorough Education

Outings to the cinema, once a common feature of living only a ten-minute walk from the Mecca of Melbourne art-house cinema (now only a ten-minute tram ride), are now rare treats. But the past twenty-four hours have seen me going to the cinema more times than I went during the whole month of July, and the two films make for an interesting comparison, primarily because, despite being from utterly different cultures, each deals in its own way with the question of education and its value.

The first, seen last night at the Indonesian Film Festival, was a film set in Kalimantan, on the border of Indonesia and Malaysia. The second, seen today in the Beanbag cinema of e Melbourne Central, was the new adaptation of "Jane Eyre". The first, appropriately entitled "Batas (Border)", dealt with a driven young woman from Jakarta who is sent by her company to a remote village near the equatorial town of Pontianak ("Vampire", in English) to find out why the local school is not being successful. The girl's experiences in the village transform her, and her presence in the village transforms the education system. She learns from them and they learn from her. An experience hunting wild boar in the jungle shows her the educational value of everyday situations, and she expands the classroom outside the "border" of a schoolhouse, taking education to where the children are, bringing it into their realm. I enjoyed the film, for its visual beauty, and the lovely soundtrack by the legendary Iwan Fals whose music I have recently discovered. Something of the sensory appeal of the film can be found in this trailer, which, regrettably, is in Bahasa with no subtitles. Still, I suppose it shows that, despite the fact that the dialogue wasn't very good (thus, you aren't missing much) the film was still a joy to watch.

Of course, its chief problem, apart from weak dialogue, was its somewhat unrealistic optimism about the human spirit. While touching on the highly sensitive issue of human trafficking in Indonesia, it passed over the problem without looking at its heart. Humans in the film were fundamentally good, if given the right circumstances. This did not explain where the trafficking problem came from. Were the traffickers a mere aberration? Were they subhuman somehow? The film avoided these kinds of questions.

"Jane Eyre" was a film with much more subtlety. It's hard to imagine a two-hour film that could possibly do justice to Charlotte Bronte, but this, I think, came close. It was delicate, moving, passionate and tender all at once, in the way that often only Bronte can be. And, though education was by no means the focus of the film, again there was something said about it, through the comparison between the "thorough education" Jane received at Norwood - a brutal, austere education through beatings and isolation - and the kind, compassionate education Jane later gives her pupil, Adele.

Of course, in Bronte, and in all the great Victorian novels, life is the great Education. Life toughens and transforms all Victorian heroes and heroines, much as Jaleswari, the heroine of "Batas", is toughened and transformed by her time in the remote Kalimantan village.

But does education transform everyone? As a teacher, I have to say I suspect it does not. Was there a process of education thorough enough that it could stop human trafficking? Surely the perpetrators of such a crime know it is wrong; they don't need to be taught that. They need their hearts to be transformed. Could education have kept Bertha Mason from going mad? Possibly, although it would have needed to change the culture that would have confined and beaten her if she had ever been admitted to receive "professional care". Education very nearly broke Jane. Human compassion saved her.

As I sit down to mark a daunting pile of student responses to "A Midsummer Night's Dream", it is with, I hope, a healthy awareness of the limits of education. And what can overcome those limits? In our humility, we should ask the one who made us. If anyone knows the answer, I'm sure it's Him.

Hard questions and elephants in rooms

W.H. Auden once wrote a deliberately obscure little poem about asking hard questions: how easy they are to ask, how infinitely hard to answer. He never names the kinds of questions he is talking about but we can conclude that he means the questions that are asked flippantly, in passing, with little regard for the answer.

Questions, for instance, like "How are you?"

I commented on this a few years ago in a post that I'm linking here not because it was particularly good (it wasn't actually) but because I don't want to feel that I'm repeating myself needlessly. My point back then is similar to my point now: all too often, we ask questions like these with no particular intention of waiting for the answer. Or, more to the point, we find ourselves unable to handle complex answers to what is, in reality, a far more complex question than it seems. What if we aren't okay? Will we stop our questioner in their tracks and make them wait for the answer? Will we make do with an, "Okay," or "Good thanks"? Such answers may be the more socially acceptable, but they kind of expose the futility of the question. We might as well invent a strange gargling noise that can serve the same purpose - a form of acknowledgment that a human we know is present before us. The conversation need go no further than that.

Of course, I'm making it all sound a bit silly when I put it like that, but it really is a topic which I feel deeply about. Recent experiences of melancholy, of a kind that sometimes quite frightens me, has made it all the more important to know when an honest answer is welcome, and how it is appropriate to give it. Poorly timed honest answers can lead to the kind of vast, awkward silences in which one can distinctly hear an elephant walk into the room. Those times are certainly hard.

But here's a situation that's harder. Let's say that you are okay at a particular point in time: you've had a good day, you're talking to a person who makes you feel happy. When asked how you are - if indeed you are asked - you may find it hard to give an answer that will be meaningful. You feel fine then. You feel good, even. So how do you answer? Do you say, "Good thanks", because, for that moment, it's true? Do you then go away and, once alone, feel quite far from okay? Do you find yourself, at that moment, even further in the midst of a sinking, desperate kind of loneliness?

Auden poses no answer to the problem he raises. But he does give us a riddle, a hopeful kind of riddle which leaves us feeling as if therein, perhaps, lies something which is, if not an answer, at least a direction to walk in. Love, he suggests, might hold the solution: both the question that we really want to ask, and the answer we are too frightened to give.

Love and grace will, I pray, help me persevere through awkward silences and overcome elephants wandering into rooms. But I also pray that love may help those who ask these questions, thoughtlessly, in passing, at times and in places where no honest answer could ever be given - I pray that love might help transform those moments of awkwardness into times of true communication.

Inertia and friction

Some weeks, there are many wonderful ideas for blog posts circulating round my head, waiting for the opportune moment to be written. Then, when the time comes and I can sit at my computer to write one of them - blankness. I sit and fiddle with the keyboard, tapping out atonal compositions on the arrow keys, fingers up and down, up and down, nothing formulating, and there is only a numb sense that there must be something meaningful, somewhere, in all of this that deserves recording.

The trouble is that words don't do justice to feelings like this. If I were more clever with words, I might be able to convey it for you, but tonight there isn't much that I can do with words. I wish that I could take a photograph to show how it looks inside my mind tonight, because there might be some who would recognise that appearance and be encouraged by the recognition. But some people might be troubled by how it appeared, or confused, or disturbed. Some may not understand, and we are almost always afraid of what we don't understand. I'm afraid of it myself.

It isn't a night for blogging. Times like these expose the gaping hole in what a blog, or anything with words, can ever do. They are times when the human mind most cries out to be understood, and yet it is at its least coherent, its least expressive. On nights like tonight, I hold out my hand and wait for God to lift me again. On nights like tonight, my greatest comfort is a man crying alone in a garden, his friends asleep and ignorant, his heavenly father hearing every word.