I went to see The Class the other night, and it has me wondering about possible changes to the web from a different angle.
In the movie a young bourgeois Frenchman is trying to teach French in a tough school. Despite a troubled relationship with a kid named Souleyman, there is a bit of a breakthrough half way into the film when the teacher allows the kid, who refuses to write an assigned self-portrait, to submit instead a collection of annotated photographs. The teacher promptly pins them to the bulletin board and invites the class to cluster around and look. The other kids had to read their self-portraits aloud, so Souleyman gets to participate in the self-exposure too. He stands in the background, half uncaring what anyone thinks, half pleased at the oohing and ahhing. You watch the half smile and his steady gaze at his own work, and you think, "shift." From this point on, supposedly, promise has been hinted at and must be fulfilled or rejected.
I don't want to give away the film for those of you eager to take in a slightly overlong look at French inner city education. But without giving away the ending there comes a moment when the teacher wonders aloud to other professors if the boy hasn't reached his "scholastic limits" in the school. I took this as condescension. The boy can't learn beyond a certain point. My friend took it as sympathetic. The school is imperfectly organized to develop the young and more scholasticism is not what the young man needs. Not more papers in other words, but maybe more photographs.
Schools are where we send the young to receive certain skills and a body of certain ideas we consider basic to function in the world. Public schools in particular spring out of a reformist century that felt the need to bring information to the isolated and bereft. The title of the movie in French, Entre les murs (Between the walls), emphasizes the box of the building as the locale where teaching happens. But for the children the idea of their exposure to the wider world as happening "between the walls" of school would be absurd. And not merely in the experiential sense but also in the most practical sense. Today the slipstream of information and even know-how exists out in a digital flow that transcends walls. Cellphones might be forbidden in class, but they represent content just as do books.
The movie, I should stress, is not at all interested in the students' relationship to new media. Its focus is on the students' relationship to the teacher. But I can't help taking the verité style at face value and wondering what the same kids learn outside the walls and inside the walls and down in the courtyard during break over the web. In the movie schoolchildren have two options (if they finish): university or vocational school. Maybe that does accurately describe what they can do, but it is not at all an accurate description of what they can know, and at least from the point of view of art, the view of a photographer say or a designer or a painter, that knowledge has a thousand different applications in and outside and around the structures of university or vocational schooling. In other words, Souleyman could quit the school any day and begin to work in visual media. He might be working odd jobs to support himself, but profession and means of support are often separate things anyway.
Could the openness of the web cause long term shifts in how the poor or underprivileged consider their options? It would probably take a long stretch of time with current web dynamics in place to tell one way or the other. And what if the perceived richness is temporary, at least at current levels of availability? Will the interaction be the same if more and more things require payment or subscriptions to access? Will alteration in profit models create dams that tamp down the spawning effect of information from site to site? Or will registered identity also transform to accommodate ease of use? I don't know the answers to these questions or even if they are in the right vein, but I do suspect that the students within the walls at poor schools are less confined by their physical circumstances than their teachers might give them credit for.
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