Up the Down Staircase

In the category of "the more things change, the more they stay the same," consider Up the Down Staircase, a film about an inner-city school that was released fifty years ago. As I watched, it seemed not much different than what I faced when I taught at an inner-city school--too much bureaucracy, teachers who were in survival mode, and students who were completely unruly.

Many have heard Socrates' quote, attributed by Plato: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." So complaining about kids is nothing new. Paul Lynde sang, in Bye Bye Birdie, "What's the matter with kids today?" and that was almost sixty years ago. Just think--the kids represented in Up the Down Staircase would now be in their late 60s, just the right age to be complaining about millennials.

Sandy Dennis stars as an idealistic English teacher. She's immediately disillusioned, as there is no time for teaching. She doesn't have enough supplies, or even desks, a window in her classroom is broken, and the students see her as raw meat. She is faced with a plethora of forms (it was amusing to see a bureaucracy before computers--imagine taking attendance in an actual book).

But of course she does her best, and is determined to reach a student (Jeff Howard) who is always getting kicked out. She faces disappointments, such as when a student who was improving drops out, and another student attempts suicide after being spurned by another teacher, who callously grades her love note right in front of her.

I recognized a lot of education today in this 1967 film. At my school there is an up and down staircase, although they are not labeled as such. Though things have changed in technology and teaching methods (no one believes in the lecture anymore--kids don't have the attention span for it) the film, directed well by Robert Mulligan, makes a trenchant statement about teaching in "troubled" schools, where kids fall through the cracks easily. A tyrannical dean treats kids like future criminals, while the teachers are left to fend for themselves.

Of interest in the cast is Jean Stapleton, the future Edith Bunker, as the office secretary.

Up the Down Staircase is gritty and authentic and even at fifty years old, still relevant.