Unman, Wittering and Zigo. [1971] Kids as killers. Film Critic Judith Crist wrote: “It carries Vigo’s, Zero for Conduct and Lindsay Anderson’s If … From infancy and fantasy to the cold light of contemporary realism, going from horror in the nursery to subtle terrors in the classroom. And it brings us to the final sad farewell of Mr. Chips”.

DRC:
SCHOOL ON THE SCREEN.

“We don’t need no education,
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom..
Teacher, leave us kids alone!”

[Pink Floyd, from The Wall]

     Ask college students to describe their favorite on screen teacher as I have been doing for some years and you’re likely to hear about Mr. Feeny [Boy Meets World] or Mr. Belding [Saved by the Bell]. If they turn their attention from television to the big screen they split their votes between Glen Holland [Mr. Holland’s Opus], John Keating [Dead Poet’s Society] Mr. Escalante [Stand and Deliver] LouAnne Johnson [Dangerous Minds] and Ms. Watson [Mona Lisa Smile]. If they’re in special education, some students might nominate Annie Sullivan, the teacher of Helen Keller. [The Miracle Worker]

     If you’re in a college of education as I am and if you have graduate students or older lateral entry teachers, then the list gets longer. Mark Thackeray [To Sir With Love] still has his fans. I was in high school when that film came out. Less than a decade later, just like the kids in that film, my own class would give me a present, a pewter mug that I have to this day, engraved, “To Sir With Love”. Of course none of them actually called me sir, it was always much more informal, Dave or Consie.

     Few of today’s college students know Richard Dadier [The Blackboard Jungle] Sylvia Barrett [Up the Down Staircase] Jean Brodie [The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie] or Mr. Chipping [Goodbye Mr. Chips] Yet these movie mentors firmly cemented the stock conventions when it comes to school on the screen, and 2 of them, Robert Donat for Mr. Chips and Maggie Smith for Jean Brodie took home Oscars for their effort.

     The representation of teachers in movies is for the most part focused on one individual, the teacher as hero. It is frequently a formula in which a new teacher [often not certified] meets a difficult class, wins the class over, loses the class and then wins the class back after confronting physically, morally or intellectually, the class leader.

     Such stories also contain representations of teaching as a profession and process, school administrators, students, [almost always middle school or older] curriculum, parents and discipline. Whether comedies like School of Rock, or dramas like Remember the Titans, or Pay it Forward, they constitute a fascinating collection of movies that make for an important case study of media representation.

     It was this subject matter that became the focus for the first article I ever had published. The year was 1980. I was well along the way in my research for what ultimately became The Cinema of Adolescence. In researching teenagers however, I invariably had to research the social institutions they lived in, including the family and school. So was born my case study, School on the Screen. It was published in Melbourne, Australia in The Secondary Teacher, a union magazine. It was also my first cover story.

     More than a quarter century later we still see variations of movie mentors. Recent offerings have included Freedom Writers, The History Boys and Half Nelson for which Ryan Gosling received an Oscar nomination in 2007.

     Half Nelson is hardly the first film to depict drugs at school. Consider for example Sean Penn’s stoner student in Mr. Hand’s class [Fast Times at Ridgemont High] or most of the students in Dazed and Confused. Of course, the troubling portrait of Dan Dunne, history teacher and drug addict is considerably different than that of teenagers letting off steam with pot.

     Sex between students, between teachers and between students and teachers has also well established roots as evidenced by The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The treatment of sexuality in The History Boys is in keeping with earlier British films including If and Another Country.
As the LA Times wrote, “ the story is suffused with that British schoolboy homoeroticism emblematic of the genre, but the subject is handled in a thoughtful non-hysterical way that you’d never see in Hollywood versions of the sacred bond between pupil and teacher”.

     Anyone involved with getting teachers or students in teacher education programs to focus on media literacy will find school and the screen a useful, relevant and motivational case study including fictitious narratives as well as school coverage in local and national news outlets.

     Movies are an excellent place to start but TV is also worthy of consideration whether analyzing Miss Brookes, Charlie Moore [Head of the Class] or Gabe Kotter [Welcome Back Kotter] or classics like Mr. Novak and Room 222.

     Jack Neuman, the creator of the sixties TV series, Mr. Novak was well aware of the impact media representations of school could have on the public and the profession. In a 1964 speech he said:

          “The school teachers that I talked to were suspicious if not downright hostile. I couldn’t blame them. Motion pictures and television have treated education as farce comedy too many times. I said I was going to make a high school teacher the most popular hero ever seen on film. In short, I wanted to see if a man without a badge, a gun a horse or a stethoscope could capture a few million hearts”.

WHAT I WROTE THEN:

     “The changing image of the school and particularly the school teacher can therefore be read as a reflection, albeit a distorted one, of changes not only within the American school system but within the nation itself.

     Most astounding of all these changes is the increasingly negative portrayal of the schoolteacher. Between 1935 and 1977, for example, one finds irrefutable evidence of an increasingly negative depiction of the teacher. It is a process by which the image of the teacher moves from mentor to murderer, from scholar to scapegoat. In the end the teacher is reduced to victim, voyeur, seducer and killer”.

          [From Mentor to Murderer, chapter 6, The Cinema of Adolescence, 1985]

TODAY’S STUDENTS?

     “Technology has replaced the letter home, the pay phone, the room key, the record store, the bull session, the Penthouse pinup, the personal diary and even the Dear John letter. It is the alter ego, the introvert’s entrée into the campus clique, the new gay bar, both a supplement to and a substitute for faculty office hours, the politician’s soapbox, the bush behind which the stalker hides, and sometimes the mask behind which the race -baiter spews forth hatred. Wonderful and terrible things happen because of new communications technology, and they happen with unparalleled velocity”.

          [Barrett Seaman, Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You. 2005]

TEACHERS ON TV.

     “By the late 1960s more serious problems began to interfere with learning. There were learning disabilities and family problems including child abuse, alcoholism, drugs, unwanted pregnancy, illegal alien status and other mental and physical handicaps. From the first, television’s teachers have had to struggle to reach their students. As the barriers got higher, the teachers got even more dedicated….. The progressive prime-time educator was never a rush-the-barricades radical, but rather a strongly humanitarian, socially sensitive reformer. There hasn’t been much demand for such teachers during the current back- to- basics era. [Bronx Zoo scored better with critics than audiences] and the future of the profession on prime-time [as in real life] is up in the air. But there will probably always be some call for the benevolent mentors, officious administrators, and troubled youths who are the staples of the schoolroom scene on the small screen”.

          [From Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture, [1994] S Lichter, L Lichter and S Rothman]

APPLYING MEDIA LITERACY PRINCIPLES TO SCHOOL ON THE SCREEN.

1. Media are constructions. Whether dealing with movies, a TV series or news coverage of education, all of these narratives are written, edited, produced and marketed with an audience in mind. The selling relates to the telling.
   
   
2. Media contain conventions and codes. Whether dealing with comedy or drama, school stories have traditionally pitted a non-conventional teacher, against an oppressive administration and a tough but well-meaning group of students. By focusing on one teacher, the narratives under emphasize teaching as teamwork.
   
   
3. Media contain values & ideologies. Most of the school stories depicted in film and television value the individual over the institution, unconventional methods over traditional teaching. They do little to depict the tedium, long hours, lack of respect and obsession with testing that many teachers are forced to endure in today’s schools.
   
   
4. Media depictions may have consequences. This concept is particularly crucial when addressing news coverage of school as a place and teaching as a process. In towns and cities across the U.S. it is common for local papers to run test scores on the front page. Coverage is seldom sufficient however for citizens to be able to understand complex issues like feeder populations, literacy levels, access to technology and other elements that can impact teaching and learning. Schools are likely to make news if there is a violent incident, a drug bust or a sex scandal. Citizens and voters who do not have children in school, may get a distorted view of dysfunctional schools from such coverage and vote down bond issues thus further hampering education in their community.

School on the Screen 1980 PDF