The Changing of the Guard

From The Twilight Zone (1963)

It’s Time for Our Back to School Special.
From now through Labor Day,
we’re offering a year’s subscription at 50% off
on all upgrades and on gifts.

If you know a college student who is entering or returning to the trenches of higher education, why not sign them up for a year of Word & Song?
We’re admittedly old fashioned here! But we believe that now more than ever, college students—all young people—need daily doses of
the good, the beautiful, and the true.

It’s our week for teaching, and we’ve featured here at Word and Song a couple of brilliant films about the figure of the teacher. There’s the near-tragic but ultimately triumphant — it is a modest triumph, but a triumph no less — film about a teacher of Greek at an English boys’ school, a failure in the classroom, and a failure as a husband, but still a human being, with a soul still capable, perhaps just barely, of devotion and delight in truth and beauty: The Browning Version (Michael Redgrave in the lead role; he will wring your heart). There’s the sweet and wistful tribute that James Hilton paid to his own schooling in England: Goodbye, Mr. Chips (with Robert Donat as Mr. Chipping, and the wonderful Greer Garson as the dearest love of his life). Someday I promise we will do Blackboard Jungle, with its own magnificent cast, led by Glenn Ford the teacher in a failed city school, and Sidney Poitier as the one student he has the best chance of reaching. But today we turn again to that series of playlets alternating between Greek tragedy (most of the time) and Christian comedy (considering “Christian” in a very broad sense), The Twilight Zone.

The episode is called “The Changing of the Guard,” and for two reasons, ironically incompatible with each other. The first is that an old teacher at a boys’ boarding school in Vermont, one Professor Ellis Fowler (Donald Pleasence, with his most expressive face and quiet voice), is being cashiered. The young headmaster thinks that Fowler’s 50 years of service are too many. Professor Fowler receives the news on Christmas Eve. He’s a bachelor who lives in a small house on the campus; teaching has been all his life. The headmaster (Liam Sullivan; you may remember him as the arrogant humbug Parmen in the Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren”) has no sense for these things, no care. Fowler has no more reason to live. He leaves his house to take his own life, next to a statue of the educator Horace Mann. The inscription at the base of the statue reads, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” The old gentleman is ashamed, thinking he has accomplished nothing. Suddenly he hears the school bell ringing, and he sees light coming from one of the classroom buildings. He goes there, and enters his room, and seven young men, their heads laid upon their desks, look up from the darkness as light shines upon them, and they greet their old professor. Every one of the boys has died, and every one of them owes what they achieved, by virtuous heroism, to what Professor Fowler taught them.

I think that every good teacher understands what moves Fowler so profoundly. None of us knows, really, how we have touched the souls in our charge. But I shouldn’t let the teacher take all the credit. The writer of the episode, Rod Serling himself, did not do so. What Professor Fowler taught those boys, he imparted to them by means of great and good literature: so we hear from one of them that immemorial line from John Donne, that no man is an island; from another, some verses by the poet and minister Howard Walter, that “I would be brave, for there is much to dare.” The boys aren’t boastful, though they accomplished much for their fellow man; they are heroic, but with the shy modesty of youth, that shines in their eyes. They have come, obviously, to save the man who meant so much to them, though he himself never suspected it.

This too is one to watch with your older children. I might say more, particularly about the making of boys into good men, but that would take us into another field. It was American television at its best.

Today we were only able to find clips of “The Changing of the Guard” on Youtube. The entire episode is available on Internet Archive, here.

Note: Paid subscribers have unlimited access on demand to our archive of over 1,000 posts; our most recent posts remain available to all for several weeks after each publication. We think of the archive as a little treasure trove, and we hope that our readers will revisit and share our posts with others as we continue our mission of reclaiming — one good thing at a time — the beautiful and the true!