Spare the Rod
Spare the Rod is a 1961 British social drama, directed by Leslie Norman and starring Max Bygraves, Geoffrey Keen, Donald Pleasence and Richard OSullivan. The film was based on a novel by Michael Croft and deals with an idealistic schoolteacher coming to a tough area of East London to teach in a secondary modern school at a time when such establishments were largely starved of attention and resources from education authorities and were widely regarded as dumping grounds with subpar teaching standards, for the containment of nonacademically inclined children until they reached the schoolleaving age.
John Saunders Bygraves, a supply teacher with progressive anticorporal punishment views, arrives to take up a post at Worrell Street School in a socially deprived area of East London. He is assigned a class of pupils in their last year before leaving school and finds himself in charge of a group of rebellious, badlybehaved teenagers from poor home backgrounds, with no interest in education, who register their defiance of authority by fighting, throwing classroom furniture around, whistling and laughing during bible readings and smoking in class. The schools headmaster Jenkins Pleasence is wellmeaning but has long become despondent with the seemingly insurmountable challenges posed by his pupils and is resigned to merely serving out his time until retirement. His view that corporal punishment is the only way to maintain even some semblance of order in the classrooms Youll never be able to handle them unless youre as tough as they are is anathema to Saunders, who states his intention to try all other methods of discipline rather than resort to physical violence.Saunders teaching colleagues are all resistant to any change in the schools punishment policy, with their attitudes informed either by disillusion and the fear of otherwise losing control of their pupils completely, or in the case of Arthur Gregory Keen by a seeming relish for corporal punishment which borders on the sadistic. All share the view that it is useless to try to provide a meaningful education to children who they have already written off as leaving school only to drift into deadend jobs, and that the best they can hope to do is to maintain some degree of order in the classroom. Saunders sticks to his principles and starts to make some little headway with his class, although they are baffled by his refusal to rise to provocation and disobedience. He spots particular promise in one of the main troublemakers Fred Harkness OSullivan, and tries to encourage the boy to explore his potential. The first ti
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