Abstract
This book aims to help people interested in education enrich their thinking by taking a serious look at selected Hollywood films. The focus is a broad view of education, including informal education—like sports and the arts—as well as ideas which students absorb from the political life of their schools. This analysis can help challenge our assumptions about education and enrich the public debate on important issues like funding for arts education, what we mean by successful civic education, and the educational value of sports. The chapter addresses the questions:
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Why just Hollywood movies?
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Are movies themselves educative?
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What is the educational value of “happy endings”?
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How to analyze movies for their educational value?
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Thelma and Louise (1991) is a film classic in many ways. Nothing tops its endorsement of “ordinary media skill knowledge ” than when Louise asks Thelma (1:53:00) “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” to which she replies, “Off the TV!” Unfortunately, that line spoken in the film is not included in the “final shooting script” found online. Nowadays, an internet search of “How to shoot a gun” yields millions of hits. The illustrated “wikiHow” entry begins “Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, shooting a handgun with precision requires balance, technique and practice.”
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Even when Hollywood films seem to avoid a happy ending , they still deliver. For example, in the high school football movie Friday Night Lights (“based on a true story”), the underdog team the movie has followed all season comes from behind in the state finals but still loses the championship, literally by a yard. The film’s postscript informs us that they won the championship the next season.
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One place to start is Giannetti ’s (2013) classic Understanding Movies, now in its 13th edition.
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References
Bulman, R. (2005). Hollywood goes to high school. New York: Worth.
Dalton, M. (2017). The Hollywood curriculum: Teachers in the movies. New York: Peter Lang.
Giannetti, L. (2013). Understanding movies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Lindblom, C., & Cohen, D. (1979). Usable knowledge: Social science and social problem solving. New Haven: Yale University.
Mead, B., & Mead, J. (2016). “I love you guys”: Hoosiers as a model for transformational and limited transactional coaching. Sports Coaching Review, 5(1), 29–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/21640629.2016.1175151.
Pangle, T. (1980). The laws of Plato. New York: Basic Books.
Resnick, D. (2000). Film images of private schools. Journal of Educational Thought, 34(1), 73–91.
Rorty, R. (1993). Contingency, irony and solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mayer Resnick for helpful comments on this chapter.
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Resnick, D. (2018). Introduction. In: Representing Education in Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59929-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59929-2_1
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