Abstract
In an early scene in Peter Bogdanovic’s 1970 film The Last Picture Show, a classroom scenario provides foreshadowing for the depressing tableau of rural, small-town Texas ennui that follows.1 As the scene opens, a high school English teacher is perched upon his desk, engrossed in a volume of Romantic poetry, while all around him juvenile chaos reigns in his classroom: two male students play fight with one another, while another male student launches a wad of paper across the room, and a young female student checks her makeup in a compact. As the last attendance bell rings, the teacher (played by Hollywood veteran John Hillerman) continues to ignore his students as late arrivals wander aimlessly into the classroom. Finally roused from his book by the increasing volume of noise, the teacher addresses the class with an opening remark dripping in irony: “Well, I wonder what my chances are this morning of interesting you kids in the work of John Keats.” Without missing a beat, a student named Duane (played by a young Jeff Bridges) shoots back: “None at all.” The teacher chuckles at Duane’s retort as the rest of the class explodes in appreciative laughter.
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Notes
Bogdanovic’s film is based on Larry McMurtry’s 1966 best-selling novel: Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show (New York: Penguin Books, 1966).
Mark Goldman, City on the Edge: Buffalo, New York (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 255.
Margaret Mead, The School in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 5.
Patrick Ryan and Sevan Terzian, “Our Miss Brooks : Broadcasting Domestic Ideals for the Female Teacher in the Postwar United States,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 21 (Winter 2009): 76–100.
The textual analysis process used in this project emerges from the sociological school of film studies as exemplified in Robert Bulman’s work. Robert C. Bulman, Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools and American Culture (New York: Worth Publishers, 1985).
See Michael W. Apple, Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000);
Gerald W. Bracey, The War Against America’s Public Schools: Privatizing Schools, Commercializing Education (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2002);
Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004);
Linda Symcox, Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002);
David B. Tyack, Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Carol Witherell and Nel Noddings, “Prologue: An Invitation to Our Readers,” in Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education, eds. Witherell and Noddings (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991), 1.
Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 2.
See also Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
Alan S. Marcus, Scott A. Metzger, Richard J. Paxton, and Jeremy D. Stoddard, Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies (New York: Routledge, 2010), 7.
Timothy Shary, Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 26.
Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
Robert Edelman, “Teachers in the Movies,” American Educator 7 (Fall 1983): 26–31.
Blackboard Jungle is based on Evan Hunter’s (nee Salvatore Lombino) 1954 memoir of the same name: Evan Hunter, The Blackboard Jungle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954).
William Ayers, “A Teacher Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hero,” in Images of Schoolteachers in Twentieth-Century America: Paragons, Polarities, Complexities, eds. Pamela Bolotin Joseph and Gail E. Burnaford (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 147.
The film is based on Bel Kaufman’s 1965 novel: Bel Kaufman, Up the Down Staircase (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965).
Charles E. Silbermann, Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (New York: Vintage, 1970), 6.
Ivan Ilich, Deschooling Society (London: Marion Boyars, 1971).
Gerald L. Gutek, American Education, 1945–2000 (New York: Waveland Press, 2000), 206–207.
Washington and Dahlgren comment: “In the same way that Counts (1934) and others (e.g., Harold Rugg) emphasized the analysis of the Communist Party and the concerns over poverty prevalent during the 1930s, Kownslar’s (1967) text Discovering American History … undeniably promoted the concerns of the 1960s social movements around civil rights and the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.” Elizabeth Y. Washington and Robert L. Dahlgren, “The Quest for Relevancy: Allan Kownslar and Historical Inquiry in the New Social Studies Movement,” in The New Social Studies: People, Projects & Perspectives, ed. Barbara Stern (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2010), 99.
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© 2015 Sevan G. Terzian and Patrick A. Ryan
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Dahlgren, R.L. (2015). Prosaic, Perfunctory Pedagogy: Representations of Social Studies Teachers and Teaching in 1970s and 1980s Movies. In: Terzian, S.G., Ryan, P.A. (eds) American Education in Popular Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410153_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410153_9
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