The Real Lesson of ‘Oleanna’? : David Mamet’s play is now a film, and while deftly exposing the complexity of sexual harassment cases, it also takes on another subject long overdue for study: education.

David Mamet’s controversial play “Oleanna” was an Off Broadway sensation in 1992 and went on to a long, successful run in London. The film version, directed by Mamet and based on his screenplay, opened Friday.

When it debuted in the wake of the 1991 Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings on Capitol Hill, “Oleanna” seemed to encapsulate the stormy national debate over sexual harassment. In its gripping dramatization of an ambiguous, increasingly tortured exchange between a male professor and his female student, it challenged the rampant political correctness of the time.

By showing that conflicts between superiors and subordinates are far more complex than conventional victim-centered feminism allowed, Mamet dared to suggest that both parties bear equal responsibility in any social transaction. “Oleanna” forces the audience to become a jury, a voyeuristic Greek chorus who must scrutinize the behavior of the two clashing characters and weigh their testimony. Different viewers will come to different conclusions. But Mamet incisively demonstrates that women cannot--as too many partisans of Anita Hill claimed--be automatically believed simply because they are women.

In the two years since the first production of the play, the tide has begun to turn against the forces of political correctness in America. There is a powerful, bipartisan reform movement at work in the media and in academe that is systematically critiquing the excesses of feminist ideology and of fanatical special interests of all kinds. The trend toward campus speech codes has been reversed, as thoughtful liberals have begun to realize that progressive values cannot be achieved by totalitarian means.

Now that the dust is settling, “Oleanna” can be seen more clearly. The early, largely enthusiastic reviewers of the play reduced it to its terrifying Inquisitional theme: The student comes to the professor’s office to inquire about her grade and ends up, with little discernible provocation, accusing him of sexual harassment and rape, hysterical charges that lead to his sudden dismissal from his job and, as the play ends, perhaps his future arrest.

But Mamet is using sex war to explore a much larger subject, one that has been amazingly neglected by contemporary artists and writers: education. For the last 20 years, arguments over American education have been polarized into a simplistic opposition between Right and Left. Conservatives call for a back-to-basics curriculum supported by traditional values of morality and patriotism, while many liberals demand a multicultural curriculum organized around “identity politics,” the claims of historically oppressed groups for recognition and restitution.

“Oleanna” breaks this tiresome stalemate by isolating and examining the starkly skeletal structure of modern teacher-student relations. What is the purpose of education? Mamet asks a philosophical question that is as old as Socrates but that has moved to the center of the modern cultural agenda. Is education memorization of facts or enlargement of perspective? Is it technical training or general enlightenment?

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In “Emile” (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the founder of Romanticism whose ideas helped trigger the French Revolution, argued that children’s upbringing should follow benevolent Mother Nature rather than corrupt masculine civilization--which feminism currently calls “patriarchy.” Rousseau stressed emotion, spontaneity and self-esteem, rather than rules, rationality and book learning. He denied that authority figures like teachers have any special knowledge.

Rousseau’s ideas remain a dominant force in educational policy and child psychology. His major disciples included John Dewey, whose thinking inspired the foundation of experimental, alternative colleges like Bennington, and Maria Montessori, whose relaxed program for preschoolers focuses on stimulating children’s innate creativity rather than imposing adult expectations and concepts on them.

Mamet attended Vermont’s alternative Goddard College in the late 1960s, a turbulent decade that tried to transform the traditional American model of strict classroom education, devised in the 19th Century for a rapidly industrializing pioneer nation of farmers and immigrants. Students of the 1960s counterculture were demanding “relevance” in their courses, and the most utopian among them prophesied the birth of open universities with no entrance requirements, no exams, no grades, no classrooms and no hierarchy of any kind. Strolling through idyllic green meadows, teacher and student would be friendly equals in the quest for truth.

“Oleanna” bears the traces of Mamet’s long reflection on these matters. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a time warp in his characterization of the professor, who talks in a smarmy, late-1960s way about the folly of pretending to know more than the student and who denigrates the teaching-and-testing format as merely sadistic “hazing” of the young.

This fellow’s dumb, pseudo-hippie stunt of rashly promising the girl an A, even though the course is only half over, provides the hard evidence for her questionable claim of sexual harassment.

It might have made more contemporary sense for Mamet to have made his callow, bumbling, insecure professor a slicker, more arrogant type--like the amoral careerists who have sailed to the top of the Ivy League and the University of California by spouting esoteric French theory and feminist and Marxist propaganda. But “Oleanna” is devastatingly truthful about the intrusion of bourgeois values of comfort, security and property into a profession whose spiritual roots are in the monastic Middle Ages, when the scholar’s life was ascetic.

Materialism and worldly ambition have corrupted the faculty of the elite schools, an issue completely ignored in our over-politicized culture wars. “Oleanna” begins with the professor frantically spluttering into the telephone, as he closes the deal on a prize house, the symbol of his vocational success. An academic committee has just granted him tenure, a lifetime guarantee of employment that was once meant to ensure academic freedom but that has perhaps become yet another enforcer of sycophancy and conformity.

The girl who comes as a suppliant to his office witnesses the professor’s absorption in house and family and, in one possible interpretation, seems to hatch her plot out of smoldering, envious malice.

Mamet wavers about her class background. At first she seems economically deprived, unprepared for her classroom experiences among the more privileged. But as the play goes on, she becomes the spitting image of the naive, pampered, self-pitying, white middle-class girl whose princess fantasies and whining demands for protection and approval have so deformed feminism on campus.

Throughout his career, from “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “American Buffalo” to “Speed-the-Plow” (Madonna’s Broadway debut), Mamet has been accused of misogyny. His characters tend to be bluff, brusque, noisily competitive men, while his women are peripheral, recessive or unformed.

Carol, the student of “Oleanna,” evolves in the play from what Helen Gurley Brown used to call a timid little “mouseburger” into an implacable Fury, lashing the defeated and destroyed professor with her newfound words. At the climax, she speaks not just for herself but for her “group,” a shadowy, presumably feminist cell of humorless, book-banning, Stalinist ideologues.

Is Carol a misogynous caricature? As an educator of 23 years who has taught in a wide variety of schools, I can testify that Mamet’s portrait of Carol is creepily accurate. She is the tyrant super-hero of American political correctness, which has reversed the revolutionary changes in behavior wrought by my bawdy, feisty 1960s generation and enslaved the image of woman to Victorian standards of decorum, propriety, purity and frailty.

After the first preview of “Oleanna” in its 1992 run at a Harvard University theater, Mamet was confronted by an angry band of students from Brown University, one of whom accused him of “political irresponsibility.” Shocked and upset, he complained to his friend Harold Pinter, the British playwright, about the reactionary drift of American culture, which was stifling free thought and free speech and, if unchecked, would end artistic life as we know it.

I sympathize with Mamet’s outrage, since after a chaotic lecture at Brown the same year, I was screamed at by a mob of the most infantile, irrational women I have ever seen in my life. These coddled, affluent students were the vicious Red Guards in action. At elite schools nationwide, I have been picketed and boycotted, and my book “Sexual Personae” has been routinely banned from most women’s studies programs.

“Oleanna” emerges from the decades after World War II in America, when universal higher education, for the first time in history, became a great democratic ideal. But in the humanities, when “inclusiveness” was exalted over scholarship, standards began to decline. Therapy has become a substitute for intellectual inquiry.

The pleasant holiday-resort ambience of so many American campuses--into which violence erupts at the end of “Oleanna”--has become a narcotic that is dulling the brain and stunting student development. Colleges seem to exist solely, in Mamet’s sharp phrase, to “artificially prolong adolescence.”

Seeking freedom, students of the 1960s rebelled against the parietal rules where colleges acted in loco parentis (“in place of the parent”). In contrast, today’s students--latchkey children of prosperous, professional parents--crave attention and oversight from authority figures.

“I’m not your father,” Mamet’s professor declares to Carol. “I want understanding!” she later shouts at him. If our students are ever to become adults, and if young women are to achieve at the level of men, we must break the unholy marriage of servility and sanctimony that really rules campus politics.