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To Sir With Love: Discourses, Positions And Relationships

Research Paper
Identify and discuss professional issues in education evident in a film or a piece of young people's literature in which a teacher plays a fairly cental role.

This essay will critically analyse the discourses, positions and relationships, as well as certain individuals habitus' (after Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, cited in Gale & Densmore, 2000), which influence the classroom of Mark Thackeray (Sidney Potier) in the film To Sir with Love (Clavell, 1966). Via this analysis, I argue that the film portrays a simplistic, commercial palatable rather than a realistic image of the challenges of teaching, leading the viewer to a distorted perception of the implications of the various discourses employed.
In order to clarify this point, I compare several incidents depicted in the film, with the same incidents as they are described in the autobiographical book by E.R. Braithwaite(Braithwaite, 1959), upon which the film is based. In doing so, I will evaluate the pedagogy of the films teacher (Thackeray) against the standards set for graduates and teachers respectively by the Queensland Board of Teacher Registration (hereafter BTR) and Education Queensland (hereafter EQ). Identifying the faulty conclusions which an uncritical viewing of the film may lead to, with regard to the availability of equal opportunity and social justice, I will make specific recommendations for reconstructed teaching practice, drawing on literature on social justice and democratic schooling.

The film To Sir, with Love (hereafter ‘the film'), centres around three interlinked individualist assumptions: that social and economic advancement is sure if one tries hard enough (meritocracy), that race and class are no barrier to social and economic advancement (‘equal playing-field'), and that innate talent rather than learnt skill, plays the most crucial role in a person's success (giftedness). These will be referred to in turn below.
In contrast to this individualist stance,...