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| Character
Education and Film |
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The
Emperor's Club
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| Spiderman |
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| We
welcome your suggestions for films that can be integrated into classroom
discussions of ethics and character. Please email your recommendations to
caec@bu.edu. |
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| The
Emperor's Club |
| Review
by Kevin Ryan, Director Emeritus, CAEC |
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| Films
about high school are becoming as ubiquitous as twenty-something sitcoms.
With a few exceptions [Mr. Holland's Opus and the Dead Poet's Society],
they invariably portray high schools and their classrooms as adolescent
playgrounds overseen by banal and inept misfits masquerading as teachers.
The Emperor's Club is a welcome departure for these teenager fantasy-feeding
embarrassments. It is, believe it or not, about education. Indeed, it is
about the school's oldest and most critical mission, the education of character. |
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| Kevin
Kline plays the film's central character, Mr. Hundert, the Western Civilization
teacher and assistant headmaster of St. Benedict's, a prep school for privileged
boys. The plot centers on Mr. Hundert's moral struggles with a new student,
the son of a powerful and arrogant senator. The boy is rebellious but charismatic
and gradually undermines Mr. Hundert's class and the strict discipline of
the school. |
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| The
movie takes place in two time periods, separated by twenty-five years, presumably
the mid-70s and the present. The key incident is an annual contest among
the Western Civilization students run by Hundert to award a valued prize
given to the student who publicly demonstrates the greatest mastery of the
ancient world. Bell, the corrupt student, cheats and Hundert, who in the
midst of the contest realizes it, is told by the headmaster to ignore it.
Twenty-five years later, when Bell is rich and successful, and about to
launch his own senatorial run, he brings his former teacher and classmates
together for a reenactment of the contest and to secure the support of his
friends for his campaign. |
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| Behind
this engaging plot, however, is a refreshing picture of what high school
education ought to be: a forging of intellectual growth and character formation.
Mr. Hundert's classroom is a small universe where students engage the world's
wisdom and where they are challenged to moral greatness. Mr. Hundert comfortably
and completely embodies the Socratic ideal of the teacher: to help students
become both smart and good, people of both intellect and character. In a
key scene with Bell's senator father, the senator asks Hundert what he thinks
he is doing. Surprised, Hundert says he is concerned with the formation
of the boy's character. The senator dismissively tells Hundert to just give
him the facts and he'll take care of his son's character. In this, the film
captures the emptiness of so much of American education, where education
has been reduced to a meritocratic transfer of information and teachers
are reduced to mere facilitators of the process. |
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| While
an engaging and well acted film, The Emperor's Club serves larger purposes:
it reminds us what a noble profession teaching can be and what the essence
of an education is all about. |
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| The
Emperor's Club |
| Review
by Karen Bohlin, Executive Director of the CAEC |
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| Set
in the 1970s at St Benedict’s, a private New England prep school for
boys, Universal Pictures’ new film, The Emperor’s Club, stars
Kevin Kline as the straight-laced bachelor classics teacher, Mr. Hundert,
who meets his match in the savvy son of a senator, Sedgwick Bell, played
marvelously by Emile Hirsch. Heraclitus’ famous words "character
is destiny" are borne out as the students in Hundert’s class vie
to place in the school’s longstanding Julius Caesar competition. |
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| A
different tale altogether from Dead Poets Society, The Emperor’s Club
moves well beyond the tumult of adolescent rebellion and aspiration into
the world of the high school-student-become-adult. The film is as much about
Hundert and his reflections on what it means to be a teacher as it is about
Sedgewick, his dramatic foil. The central challenge for both is the extent
to which they can shape their successes and failures through the choices
they make. Without being moralistic, Emperor’s Club invites us to examine
the influence of those choices on a person’s life and legacy. |
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| There
is little heartwarming schmaltz in Emperor’s Club. While the classroom
scenes take us back in time, replete with sage insights from ancient Greece
and Rome, the drama thrusts us into present day and the concerns pressing
for our collective attention |
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| The
themes evoked in The Emperor’s Club raise timely and provocative questions
that merit consideration from parents, teachers, politicians, and corporate
America. The Emperor’s Club is not only a compelling story but also
a worthy case study in ethics. Hollywood has produced an important film,
one that is both engaging and instructive. |
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| The
Emperor's Club |
| Eli
H. Newberger, M.D is the author of The Men They Will Become: The Nature
and Nurture of Male Character (Perseus Books, 1999) and is on the faculty
of the Department of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. |
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| When
I was in eighth grade, my friends Jimmy Scagnelli, Perry Martin, and I cut
a class. After an hour of hanging out in the band room, playing various
instruments, and talking about girls, we tried to slip back in before the
lunch break, but Mrs. Buchar wasn’t as inattentive as we thought. She
promised there’d be hell to pay. Before the day was out, our parents
had been called, and I arrived home to find my mother in a state of bewilderment.
Her wonderful son, she had been told, was on the straight path to becoming
a criminal, and she was expected early the next morning in the Traphagen
Junior High principal’s office to plan a different life for me. |
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| A
few years later, working as a summer temp for the Mt. Vernon, NY post office
after my sophomore year at Yale, I noticed Mrs. Buchar’s name in a
bank of apartment mailboxes and knocked on her door. Resisting the temptation
to remind her of her failed prediction, I introduced myself as her former
student. She said she was grateful for the visit because, since retiring
two years before, she no longer had regular contact with kids. All the miscreants
turned out fine: Perry became a high school music teacher, Jimmy a union
leader, and I’m a pediatrician. We weren’t from privileged backgrounds,
just solidly middle-class second-generation suburbanites. Nothing was assured
for us, and we knew we had to work hard to succeed in life. |
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| But
I have changed my mind about the seeming over-reaction by Mrs. Buchar and
the Traphagen School principal. Even more now than before, minor transgressions
like these should not go unnoticed; as ridiculous as it seemed for Mrs.
Buchar to hang crepe about our future careers when we were only 13, ninth
grade is a make-or-break time for boys, current research indicates. If they
are behind a grade, had experience with sex or drugs, suffered or witnessed
serious violence, they are likely to be on a "failure track" unless
someone steps in to help. And mostly someone doesn’t. |
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| In
the interviews I conducted as part of the research I did for my book on
boys’ character development, I was saddened to hear high-functioning
boys make comments like these: "But his parents kind of let him do
what he wants. They’re sort of afraid of him." "Some of my
friends’ parents aren’t there for them, so they actually tell
me their stuff, and I feel really bad. Their parents aren’t there because
they’re working or because there isn’t a relationship or connection
between them and their kids. They let things go. Most of my friends are
in that predicament. Some of the parents that are around just don’t
care. The kids will smoke dope in the house and stuff like that. One kid
says his parents don’t even know he does it; if he does get caught,
he gets grounded for a week, and that’s it." |
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| I
have my own prescription for strengthening the characters of American boys–including
relationships, where every boy has at least one adult in his life who is
just crazy about him, will stick with him and not abandon him; protection
from violence; an emotional vocabulary; and giving back high among them–to
which I would add one more after seeing the movie "The Emperor’s
Club." If American boys from 8 to 18 could see this film and talk about
it with their classmates and families, and then try to carry its moral consciousness
forward into their lives and choices, they and we would all be the better
for it. |
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| The
movie tells the story of a group of boys from wealthy families who find
themselves in an ancient history class with a celebrated teacher. But their
expensive sports coats and fine future expectations don’t shelter them–and
don’t protect their teacher from–some important key choices. In
this gorgeous private school these boys buck against the same hormones,
temptations, and restrictions as flowed through Perry, Jimmy, and my veins
and lives when we were 13. Decisions and choices, where character is tested,
and manifested, present themselves innocently and not-so-innocently. And
mistakes are made, by the boys, of course, and by the adults, who you’d
think would know better. |
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| What’s
so exciting about the movie is the way it resonates to virtually every context
in which male character is put to test: in the classroom, the locker room,
the executive suite, and the hallowed halls of highest institutions of democracy.
The resonance comes from the way the story is told, with contemporary, real-time
challenges, and teachers’ and parents’ responses to them. Sex,
substances, and cheating to get ahead figure in both the children's and
adults’ stories. Flash-forwards to a reunion of "The Emperor’s
Club" give a lively and vivid sense of what the better choices might
have been. |
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| There’s
no preaching here, excepting a few depictions of the familiar "do what
I say, not what I do" approach to bringing up children that so often
serves to "enable" (to use the medical term of art) dishonesty,
misogyny, and alcohol and substance abuse. What there is is a terrific story,
lots of splendid acting, and much to talk about. Importantly, there are
moral ambiguities here, choices that are right for some reasons and wrong
for others. The lack of easy solutions and conclusions in a morally ambiguous
world is what makes this movie compelling, and so worth discussing. |
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| I
wish that when I cut that class in eighth grade this movie had been around
and that my class, my family, and I had been required to see it and talk
about it. That would have been a lot more productive than the scolding,
and would have appreciated better that those simple rules had some real
meaning for our lives. |
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| When
my wife Carolyn received her doctorate at Harvard, the President of the
University uttered a little, traditional encomium for each of the graduate
schools as their new graduates stood up to take their positions of leadership.
I was prompted by the beauty of this film and its deep message on character
to recall the words said to the new graduates of the law school. They were
joining, the President intoned, the profession that governs "those
wise restraints that keep us free." |
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| Character
is all about choice. This movie gives boys, men, and the people who care
about them some splendid guidance about why we should, and can, make good
choices, and when we make mistakes, to try, with better perspective, support,
and above all a desire to do right by others, to improve our acts. All kids
have a built-in sense of fairness and want and need discipline. And all
of us, they know, and we should know, are works in progress. "The Emperor’s
Club" makes clear that real freedom is found in respecting the rules
that descend from our democratic and faith traditions, and in approaching
with consideration and kindness each moral challenge where we have to reconcile
our desires and impulses against the needs and rights of others. |
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| Susan
Young, Hyde School in Bath, ME offers the following scene as a great prompt
for reflecting on the power of choice: |
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| Our
Hero lets the robber go because he's mad at the man who runs the wrestling
matches for not paying him the full $3000. When confronted with, "You
let him go!" Spiderman responds, "I guess I missed the part
where that's my problem." He then exits the building only to
find that his uncle has been shot and killed in a carjacking--by the
very thief he just let escape him. |
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| Here
at Hyde, we run on a concept called "Brother's Keeper"--the notion
that we are all responsible for nurturing/fostering/supporting/challenging
each other's best. We are responsible for upholding the right, even when
we feel we've been wronged. We make it "our problem" when someone
else in class isn't doing his/her homework, or is misbehaving in the dorm.
The results of NOT engaging in that kind of partnership with our fellow
students/colleagues are too costly to imagine, as Spiderman finds out. |
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Copyright
2002
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| Center
for the Advancement of Ethics and Character |
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