Sentimental Education

Quoting Orwell on children’s books, Christopher Hitchens said:

what he found (in an essay called ‘Boys’ Weeklies’) was an extraordinary level of addiction to the form of story that was set in English boarding schools. Every week, boys (and girls) from the poorer quarters of industrial towns and from the outer edges of the English-speaking Empire would invest some part of their pocket-money to keep up with the adventures of Billy Bunter, Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Jack Blake and the other blazer-wearing denizens of Greyfriars and St. Jim’s. As he wrote:

‘It is quite clear that there are tens and scores of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quadrangles and house-colors, but they can yearn after it, daydream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch.’

The main body of that essay is about Harry Potter, another franchise selling the dream of a magical school that whisks talented children away from dull and impoverished lives. The film director John Hughes did something similar with his string of movies in the 1980s and Laurie Nunn, creator of Netflix’s Sex Education, drew inspiration from him. 

When I was growing up everyone loved John Hughes, but I could never stay awake through any of his films except Ferris Bueller. Sex Education was a difficult intro. The first two episodes were so annoying I was holding on for dear life. None of it made sense. Everyone sounded too posh. This bright beautiful town. This bright polished fun school where everyone gets to wear their own clothes, when in real life they’d have some horrible uniform (as indeed happens in season 3 when Hope takes over). The plot was silly. There’s a sixteen year old kid called Otis who is the son of sex therapists, but is sexually repressed. Maeve, who he is secretly in love with, suggests he start up his own sexology clinic to help the teenagers with their problems. So everyone starts paying for advice from this lad who has never had a sexual experience – even with himself.

At the end of episode three they end with a scene of Maeve sitting in her trailer, not speaking, and I realised there was something there. From that point Sex Education becomes unmissable. You get hooked into the stories of the various sixth formers as they desire and plot. The characters get fleshed out. Otis’s dad is a psychologist named Remi Milburn, absent for many years. Otis finds him at an event where he is promoting his book, ‘Is Masculinity in Crisis’? to an audience of mainly uncertain-looking young men. Afterwards the two go for a drink and Otis confronts Remi about his failings. For the first time, Remi becomes both self aware and honest. He tells his son:

You know, when you’re young… you think that everybody out there really… really gets you. But, you know, actually, only a handful of them do. All the people who like you, despite your faults. And then if you discard them, they will never come back. So when you meet those people… you should just hold on them. Really, really tightly. And don’t let them go. And whatever else you do [tapping a copy of his book] never read this fucking book.

At that point one of the lost-looking young men from the audience interrupts them to ask Remi for an autograph. Remi cheerfully signs the young guy’s copy of the worthless book. 

The school based stories are still absurd, but you begin to appreciate the setting more. There are incidental characters, bizarre performances, funny teachers, and the best cover of Peaches ‘Fuck The Pain Away’ you’ve ever heard. Moordale is fun, and everybody’s welcome. Headmaster Mr Groff has a breakdown and loses his position, and is replaced by professional young educator Hope Haddon. While Michael Groff was old fashioned, but ruled with a light touch, Hope is a modern authoritarian who imposes an abstinence-only curriculum, which doesn’t go down well. Her control of the school ends in scandal and the school being closed down. 

At that point the series could, maybe should have ended. The final season was its least popular. Moordale was replaced by Cavendish, run from below by a supremely annoying trio of teenage progressives who will charge you for gossiping in front of them. We graduated from the sex school to the Sunday School of Woke, and it was a hard adjustment for many viewers. 

In a classic hatchet job the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan wrote:

If Sex Education were staying true to its early, far more radical roots, it might do more than just hint at the potential downsides of relentless positivity, but here the rule remains absolute affirmation only… Also dragging down the mood is the fact that everyone – and not just the rival sex therapist O (Thaddea Graham) who is already set up at Cavendish – use therapy speak at all times. Sex Education scripts used to be fleet and funny. Now everyone is earnest, delivering life lessons at every turn and making you long for the days when humour was still an honoured part of the human condition.

Yet the school genre has always sought to deliver moral instruction. Entertainment was almost secondary to that. When I was a kid I read everything by Enid Blyton, including the school stories, which always had a didacticism of varying subtlety. At some point one of the characters, in the afterglow of some test of her virtue, says to herself: ‘We learn more than lessons at Whytliffe School!’

Shaad D’Souza writes: ‘While the show has previously dealt with subjects such as abortion, discrimination and sexual assault, weightier than average for a teen drama, it’s darker than it’s ever been, siloing many of its core characters, such as Otis (Asa Butterfield), his mother, Jean (Gillian Anderson), his best friend, Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), and his love interest Maeve (Emma Mackey), in order to send them on their own journeys of strife and self-discovery.’ Nunn silos them off – and in many cases puts her characters through their own tests of virtue and responsibility just as Blyton did. Even Mr Groff the former headmaster is left to try and change and grow, in the wreck of his marriage and career. He cuts a sympathetic figure and is yet another lost soul in need of instruction. 

Conservatives hate stuff like Sex Education because they see it as indoctrination – and the wrong kind of indoctrination, at that. And I could never be told anything by anyone. But there was still some of that old exhilaration in the final season. There are some writers, educators, entertainers and professionals who are driven by the need to instruct and teach others – and if they sometimes get it wrong, well, this kind of education is better than it was in my day. 

As series creator Laurie Nunn said: ‘Things move so fast nowadays and there’s so much amazing TV out there. I’m always joking that my baby’s gonna get older and be like: ‘Oh no, Mum, you made that really problematic, really embarrassing sex show.”