Summer Heights High

Reminisce with me. Cast your mind back to your high school days. Can you recall that teacher who you intuitively recognised was different, but adult experience hadn’t yet revealed just how odd they actually were? I remember one young woman who could barely get through a day without rushing from the classroom in tears; another burly man who had the habit of pegging chalk – even chairs – at talkative students. Back then they were obstacles to be navigated carefully. Now, with the benefit hindsight, I realise just how inappropriate their presence in the classroom was. It’s this sort adult realisation that gives Summer Heights High its satirical strength.

The eight-part mockumentary by writer / director Chris Lilley, just finished airing on the ABC, has generated serious controversy as it flirts with the topics of drugs in school, the education of the developmentally disabled and the distinctions between public and private institutions. Some of it has apparently been accidental, such as the unfortunate similarities between the ecstasy-related death of a fictional schoolgirl and a real teenager. Others have been deliberately courted each week, such as the token assistance and condescension afforded the disabled and the unattractive. But at the centre of each storyline is the relationship between teacher and pupil, and the failure of the latter to get what they really need.

For the uninitiated, Chris Lilley plays three separate characters who will be strangely familiar to anyone who has experienced Australia’s modern education system. Mr Greg Gregson is the flamboyant drama teacher responsible for such triumphs as Ikea: the musical and Tsunamarama (a Tsunami tribute set to the music of Bananarama). He is the emotionally unstable, success-oriented type who seems to occupy a place in most school memories. Jonah Takulua, an under-achieving Year 8 bully, sums up his classmates as either ‘homos’ or ‘rangas’ and eats away at his teachers’ composure with constant profanity and low-level disobedience. He’s as tragic as he is comic, displaying a real desire to learn to read but at the same time despising the system that makes him feel stupid. And then there’s Ja’mie King, the private school student on exchange from the exclusive Hillford Girls’ Grammar who is disturbed by the lack of Diet Coke machines in her new school, and blissfully secure in the knowledge that her arrival can only mean an improvement to the lives of public school compatriots. “Many of you come from povo families,” Ja’mie sympathises with a school assembly. “Some of you don’t even have Foxtel.”

In each of the three story-lines Lilley introduces us to a dysfunctional teacher-student relationship. The self-serving Mr G is more interested in the success of his current production than the students within it. He feels the best thing he can do for the talent-less or the disabled is to temper their expectations of life by telling them to give up now. Jonah’s only hope is a school counsellor whose overly negotiated approach provides none of the hard boundaries he needs. And Ja’mie’s princess-tantrums and veiled threats of self-harm are enough to overturn school policies that have stood for years, more because resisting her relentless suggestions will require more effort than giving in. Summer Heights High underlines the truth that the best-learnt lessons from our school days are not always the most helpful, but they still shape the way we look at life.

This review shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of teachers in general. Summer Heights High does underscore the fact that some people should never be given such critical positions of responsibility, regardless of their qualifications. However, every former student who suffered a destructive teacher is just as likely to also remember one who helped them reach a potential they didn’t know they possessed. But Lilley’s satire is all the more bitter-sweet because it highlights the increasingly impossible situation educators now find themselves in.

The primary purpose of schools used to be the passing on of concrete academic skills once neatly summarised under the chestnut of ‘reading, writing and ‘rithmetic’.  However, today’s teachers are required to shoulder an increasing amount of social work, shaping characters as well as minds, even participating in nation building (if Federal education policies are realised). These qualities of the heart, however, are always better absorbed than memorised, and less likely to be learnt in the classroom.

The education that begins at home is the one that is supposed to last a life-time. Behind the Ja’mies and Jonahs of this world is a space where a mother or a father should be standing. It is their daily involvement in the moulding of their child’s character that will secure them against the slights of even the most insensitive Mr G’s. Society blaming unruly children on an inadequate education system cuts little ice with the greatest Father. After all, discipline is the way God demonstrates his love for us, and how we should show our love for the children God has delivered into our care. 

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