Hollywood film as public pedagogy: education in the crossfire.

Any analysis of how Hollywood films represent the diverse worlds of teachers, students, and schools must begin with a subtle paradox: by focusing on schools, Hollywood cinema highlights the central importance of education in our society, yet at the same time fails to be self-critical about its own role as a powerful and influential pedagogical site. What is often obscured in this disavowal is that by defining itself almost exclusively as entertainment, the movie industry conceals the political and ideological nature of the pedagogical work it performs. Also missing from this conceit of political and pedagogical neutrality, as Jacques Ranciere puts it, is the nature of the authority through which film, as a mode of cultural production, legitimizes "a certain regime of identification, a certain distribution of the visible, the sayable, and the possible." (1) As forms of public pedagogy, films must be understood in terms of their political and educational character and how they align with broader social, racial, economic, class, and institutional configurations. In particular, Hollywood films about schools not only play an influential role in mobilizing particular meanings, affective investments, desires, and values related to our everyday understanding of the teaching profession and education, but also play a crucial role in legitimating the purpose of schooling, the definition of teaching and learning, and what constitutes important classroom knowledge. Most importantly, they shape habits of thinking by providing audiences with framing mechanisms and affective structures through which individuals fashion their identities and mediate their relationship to public life, social responsibility, and the demands of critical citizenship. (2) For better or worse, Hollywood films are not merely elements of screen culture that reproduce a magical combination of entertainment and fantasy. On the contrary, they function as emotively charged, image-saturated cultural practices where the coordinates of dominant power are often constructed and the "'state of things' seem evident, unquestionable." (3)

Given the current assault on public education in the United States by the Bush Administration, it becomes crucial to analyze Hollywood films about education in terms of how they privilege some meanings over others, particularly those ideas and values that reinforce the current attack on public education and include the emphasis on zero-tolerance policies, privatization, high-stakes testing, the de-skilling of teachers, and the imposition of business models of schooling. Surely films of the last two decades from Dead Poets Society (1989, by Peter Weir) to Freedom Writers (2007, by Richard LaGravenese) can be analyzed for how they connect--or more often fail to connect--schools to broader matters of fairness, justice, anti-racism, and the imperatives of a democratic society, and how they work through a systematic production of the given to define the shape of the visible, the unthinkable, and the possible. (4) They can also be read critically for the kinds of identities, desires, and forms of agency that they mobilize and legitimate.

As a form of public pedagogy, film registers a profound transformation regarding how people are educated in American culture today. What has become increasingly clear in the last few decades is that the major sites of education lie outside of the schools and reside in the wider screen culture and the new electronically driven media that range from digital film to the Internet to the hyper-mediated space of the Apple iPhonc. (5) Formal schooling may be an ongoing subject of Hollywood films, but schools are no longer the most important site for educating young people. The new screen technologies and media have produced a cultural landscape that now constitutes unique and powerful sites of learning. This multimedia landscape, delivered in an endless array of forms and through previously unimaginable platforms, comprises what I call new modes of public pedagogy Living in such an image-saturated culture, one cannot help but notice the power of the media to shape public consciousness, legitimize specific political agendas, influence how individual choices are made, and determine how policies are enacted. I have watched for over twenty-five years how Hollywood films have produced a number of complex, but often conservative if not reactionary representations about schooling. Early films such as Stand and Deliver (1988, by Ramon Menendez) with its emphasis on teaching for the test, to Dangerous Minds (1995, by John N. Smith) and 187 (1997, by Kevin Reynolds) affirmed the racist unconscious of dominant white culture by equating urban schools with images of menacing, poor youth of color and with the culture of crime. More recent films such as Half Nelson (2006, by Ryan Fleck), suggest that the only outlet for critically engaged teachers bucking the system is to descend into the dark world of addictive drugs. Of course, while films such as Half Nelson and Freedom Writers capture some of the important political, racial, and class dynamics at work in urban schools, even films that attempt to move beyond the Hollywood traffic in tired cliches and stereotypes ultimately collapse into a highly privatized discourse that erases larger social and historical forces or dissolve into a saccharine melodrama or paralyzing cynicism.

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While deciphering the ideological content and representational politics of films is an important pedagogical task, it is also crucial to place them in concrete historical circumstances. If we are to read films as social and political allegories articulating deeply rooted fears, desires, and visions of the future, then they have to be understood within a broader network of cultural spheres, social formations, and institutions rather than read as isolated texts. That is, they have to be critically engaged within the social anxieties and assumptions that prompted their production and their circulation as public texts in the first place. Of course, our task is not merely to read such films to determine whether their representations distort reality, but more importantly to engage those hidden messages, exclusions, and social practices that loosen the bonds of the visible, the sensible, and the landscape of the possible. (6) Hollywood and independent films--especially films about schools, teachers, and students--offer a unique opportunity for academics, teachers, and other concerned citizens to use the medium of film to engage in pedagogical struggles that foster conditions that enable young people to read against the official lies of power, received opinions, and unexamined assumptions that tend to erase everything that matters in a vibrant democracy. More importantly, such films can be engaged dialectically as part of a wider educational task of providing students with the knowledge and skills necessary for them to connect classroom knowledge to broader questions of power, politics, and public consciousness. At best, as both a public text and a pedagogical practice, any film that deals with education can be a useful optic for enabling students to recognize both education as an essential public good and democracy as the very condition for exercising any critical and viable notion of individual and social agency.

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Given the influence of films in shaping our perception of social reality in general (as well as education, youth, modes of authority, care and commitment), it is crucial that educators develop pedagogical interventions that enable young people not only to read these films critically, but also to understand how they embody forms of knowledge, values, desires, and social relations implicated in power as well as presuppose specific notions of what it means to be educated, to be a citizen, and to embrace a particular notion of the future. The following is an indicative analysis of how such films might be used as a pedagogical tool for engaging the educational force of the wider culture and to demonstrate how a critical engagement with such films can be used to produce new understandings of literacy, agency, and social responsibility. Hollywood films can provide pedagogical opportunities for young people to watch, critically interpret, and engage these larger-than-life embodiments of screen culture as part of a broader project, not only to seriously consider the relationship between critical education and democracy but also to defend both films as important public texts and schools as vital democratic public spheres.

BREAKING INTO AND OUT OF THE MOVIES (7)

My relationship to Hollywood films cannot be separated from the attractions they had for me growing up in Smith Hill, a working-class neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1950s. While my friends and I had access to the small screen of black-and-white television, it held none of the mystery, fascination, and pleasure found in the five or six grand movie theaters that lined the main drag downtown. Every Saturday afternoon, we would walk several miles to the business district, concocting elaborate schemes to get into the theaters without having to pay None of us could afford to buy tickets, so we had to be inventive about ways to sneak into the theaters without being caught. Sometimes we would simply wait next to the exit doors and, as soon as somebody left the theater, we would rush in and bury ourselves in the plush seats, hoping that none of the ushers spotted us. We were not always so lucky. At other times, we would pool our money and have one person buy a ticket and, at the most strategic moment, he would open the exit door from the inside and let us into the theater.