In “The History Boys,” Alan Bennett tries to dramatize the sexually fraught relationship of teachers and their students. But his considerable skills as a playwright are inadequate to this task. And understanding why requires looking at education in a broader philosophical context.

Twenty years ago next month, Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” (which I edited) became a surprise no. 1 best seller. Though it was a densely argued polemic by a littleknown scholar, it somehow captured the imagination of millions of general readers across the country.Widely seen at the time as a conservative critique of liberal relativism and permissiveness, it was actually a radical attack on the assumptions about modernity shared by contemporary conservatives and liberals alike: that “fact” and “value” name mutually exclusive spheres of reality, that reason and passion are alien to each other, and that politics is the realm of power, not of justice.

More than anything else, Bloom argued in favor of restoring eros to education. Eros? To modern ears, nothing could sound odder. But Bloom argued that eros is the spur to education. Following the Greeks, Bloom understood eros as the aching acknowledgment of our fundamental human incompleteness. Like Socrates, we must begin our education by recognizing that we are ignorant – lacking in knowledge. And like Aristophanes’s “circle men” – who were split by the gods and thus spend eternity searching for their lost halves – we are forever seeking the wholeness that can only be approached through the love of wisdom, otherwise known as philosophy.

Teaching can be a radically subversive activity. It can draw students away from their families, test their allegiance to tribes and regimes, challenge their self-understanding, and pit the demands of love against the claims of friendship. True education can open minds that have been closed by relativism, which dulls the erotic spirit – because if everything is permitted, then nothing is worth caring about any more than anything else.

Eros, education, the love of wisdom – these are not just Bloom’s concerns. They are also Mr. Bennett’s. But “The History Boys” is to “The Closing of the American Mind” as farce is to history. In Mr. Bennett’s play, the longing of eros is played for a cheap laugh.

Mr. Bennett is a comedian, a veteran of “Beyond the Fringe.” But he is also capable of serious playwriting. “Talking Heads” (originally on the BBC in 1988 and an off-Broadway show in 2003) showed his versatility in unerringly giving voice to ordinary people through eerily authentic monologues.

There he was writing about other people. In “The History Boys,” he seems to be writing a thinly disguised memoir of his own days as a student in Yorkshire, trying for a scholarship to Oxford. And deft though he is at dramatizing other people’s lives, he appears incapable of transforming his own experience into art.

What “The History Boys” offers instead is a weird mix of nostalgia and fantasy. Or rather wishful thinking – the idea that all boys are explicitly or latently homosexual (or at least bisexual); that they can all be seduced, intellectually and sexually; that the kind of erotic longing Bloom understood so well is nothing but simple physical lust. All but one of the eponymous boys submit to their male teacher’s advances, many of them willingly. Only one of the boys (we learn in an epilogue) suffers any ill effects from what amounts to child abuse.

Mr. Bennett knows more about what goes on in a British boarding school than the average (squeamish?) New York journalist does.And he is entitled to his view that there are few long-term effects of sex between adolescents and adults charged with their care. But his placid view of sexual relationships between a teacher and his eight students doesn’t seem like the material of come dy. Imagine the students were girls. Would we be laughing as merrily as the crowds at the Broadhurst have been? Could Mr. Bennett have written a real side-splitter about a Catholic priest having sex with his altar boys?

The extent to which this is a rosy view of the past is evident from Mr. Bennett’s clumsy musical interludes, in which the various boys perform like camp queens from the 1950s.This is especially jarring since the play is set in the 1980s and is meant, in murky fashion, as a critique of the Thatcher years. Mr. Bennett seems to be confusing his own schoolboy days in the early 1950s with a period 30 years later, when teenagers were more likely to know Boy George than Bette Davis. And his sure ear for dialogue, on display in “Talking Heads,” is apparently clogged with wax these days.

His mind is even more stuffed – with nonsense. Judging from the epilogue, where the boys are mostly shown to have grown into dull, middle-aged, white-collar conformists, their school days were the best of their lives. It is here that Mr. Bennett’s nostalgia seems emptiest.

Though he surely was exposed to the classics at Oxford, he has apparently forgotten that the word “nostalgia” derives from the Greek words for “return” and “pain.” Mr. Bennett has returned to his past, but there is no pain, only a happy fantasy about boys who enjoy, and learn from, being groped by their teacher.

This is not the eros of education, the subversive longing that can tempt students and teachers alike but can also lead up the ladder of love from the body to the soul. Instead of challenging us, Mr. Bennett flatters our sense of superiority with spot-the-reference quotes and Trivial Pursuit-like allusions. More than anything, “The History Boys” shows the sad yearning of an aging man for an imaginary past free of the torment of youth.

In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Bloom understood that a good teacher was not, or not just, a lover, but most of all a midwife helping to nurture robust souls. Mr. Bennett’s teacher, on the other hand, leaves us, and his boys, with little more than campy memories. In place of paideia, Mr. Bennett has given us pederasty. Why are people laughing at this?