“Bigger than Life” (1956)
Childhood is a congenital disease and the purpose of education is to cure it. I see my point of view is new to many of you. But ask yourselves, how do we describe the unfortunate individual who carries his unspoiled childhood instincts into adult life? We say he’s arrested. We call him a moron.
(Parents gasped, one with a daughter named Louise)
My dear lady, your Louise is a charming little creature, but we must try to examine the problem without prejudice or sentiment. The hard fact remains that your daughter, at her present stage of development, is roughly on an intellectual par with the African gorilla.
(More gasps)….
What, after all, from the Stone Age to the present day has been the greatest invention of mankind? Has anybody got a match?…(He lit his cigarette) Fire? The wheel? Safety pin? The hydrogen bomb? No, ladies and gentlemen, the alphabet. And persons like myself are required to teach these poor, bewildered kids to read by a system of word recognition as though the mighty English language were a collection of Chinese ideograms. And then we’re surprised when Junior can’t even wade through the comics….”The three Rs” — that’s just a catchphrase. Before it’s too late, we ought to get back to the real fundamentals. And I’m not just talking of primary education now. We’re breeding a race of moral midgets.
(Even more gasps)
All this hogwash about ‘self-expression’, ‘permissiveness’, ‘development patterns’, ‘emotional security’. Security — with the world ready to blow up. If the republic is to survive, we’ve got to get back to teaching the good old virtues of hard work and self-discipline and a sense of duty! My friends, I tell you, we’re committing hara-kiri every day right here in this classroom.
(Source: https://www.filmsite.org/bestspeeches17.html )
Video clip (only a few lines from the speech; scene starts at 1:11): https://video.newyorker.com/09cc645e-6ad9-4b1e-baa3-fe35c9534b5d
Trivia: Nicholas Ray, James Mason, and Clifford Odets are uncredited writers. The film shows the destructive side effects of a drug whose psychological side effects prove more harmful to schoolteacher Mason (and his family) than the disease itself. Ray once stated that he regretted naming the drug (cortisone), because his intention was to criticize the desire for any simplistic solution.
What’s notable: Mason’s outspoken rant to the PTA at first seems like a biting criticism of 1950’s conformity, with education as a solution (the individual vs. society is a common theme in Ray’s films), but the overall story shows the destructiveness of the protagonist’s megalomania and how attractive authoritarianism has become for Americans after World War II (which Ray also depicted in the western allegory about McCarthyism “Johnny Guitar”). At the end of Mason’s speech, several parents make approving comments like “That young man ought to be the president of this country!…(or) the principal of this school.” Twenty-five years before Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” “Bigger than Life” skewers the oppressiveness of an educational system that values conformity over individualism and creativity.
