Children and Education in World Cinema

Context and Rationale

If you are an English teacher like me, maybe you use film in the classroom as a vehicle for information or as a complement to a piece of literature.  Maybe you make sure that the documentary and narrative films you include are of high quality (to your taste), very topical and well-made.  You avoid using films as fillers or rewards.  If so, then we are on the same page, or frame, as it were.  I have stopped myself from showing films in class in fear of being perceived as a lazy teacher, and maybe, like mine, your school has a policy against showing movies.  Let this unit be part of a systemic argument to include film study tactically and potently in curriculum.

Studying film as film does deserve a place in an already-crowded English curriculum, and studying film is one way to love film.  Analysis and interpretation are pleasurable!  We want our students consciously participating in the game of meaning which filmmakers play.¹² The impulse to hollow a home for cinema in American schools hearkens back to the film appreciation movement of the 1930s or the notions of the Society of Cinematologists in 1959 who preached appreciation, analysis, and film history as part of literature courses.¹³  Currently, film falls under the heading of media literacy in schools.  Media studies includes radio, TV, video games, social media interaction, etc,  Each of these is an uninterrupted process of flow and remediation from earlier media while cinema has a more grounded cannon of standalone works (films).¹⁴  Media is wide and film deep; media is continuous thought while films transport us, connecting thoughts.  Media literacy is part of cultural studies, something I teach by employing an inclusive definition of “text” and “reading” to promote awareness of literature and language as culturally situated.¹⁵  Writing we call the habits of composition.  Of course, film studies and English studies cover similar terrain:  narrative structure, close reading, and intertextuality.  Further, art films provide a pathway to consider plot together with the poetic image; the world is shown as it is yet transcendent at the same time.  The word verismo captures this idea of poetic reality nicely, and I’ve begun to realize that poetic films just age better than green-screen films where the magic happens mostly in the editing bay.  Even CGI from a few years ago looks corny.  Art film is often thought of as passive, where the word “passive” is related to “passion” as opposed to “action.”  This passivity is linked to the melodrama genre in which events happen and characters react.  So the pace is slower, but viewers gain gestation-time. 

The theme of the films mentioned within this unit is education.  The reasons for this will be discussed in depth, but cinema holds many examples for how education works and counter-examples for how it doesn’t.  It’s much easier to show things falling apart, but documentaries of real classrooms lean positive.  In America, from 1935-1977, teachers were figured negatively, authoritarian and dismissive, but since then, teachers have become heroes.¹⁶  I don’t recommend showing a movie (yes, I said movie) like Lean on Me, for example, because the teacher-hero disposes of students immediately and espouses middle class conformity, preaching personal responsibility without its necessary companion, systemic responsibility–changes in educational, economic, and social opportunities.¹⁷  Lean on Me doesn’t accurately represent the school conditions where I teach, whose students, however, might easily get stereotyped in similar ways.¹⁸  Urban school films in America often look like a fantasy through which the students, and not the audience, are expected to change.  Middle-class school films deal with conformity and popularity, and upper-class private school films picture the stress of academics and ambivalence about wealth.¹⁹  This unit will not dwell on Hollywood’s representations of schooling, but the principles it contains could be applied to these films.

Freedom (think guidance systems, rules, conflict management) and discipline (think self-discipline) are the two essentials of education.²⁰  If these are present, why and how?  If they aren’t, why not and how?  School, as a common childhood experience, is often represented in film, so school is an ideal guide for curation of films and clips, providing a fairly consistent iconography, subject matter, and problem structure to consider and discuss.  Children in film are also naturally good at conveying justice issues to adults, and this especially holds for justice inside of educational institutions. 

The experiences of education and schooling are not always rewarding for my students who struggle to place their schooling in the context of their lives and their education in relation to their futures.  Michael Armstrong, a British scholar who studies childhood imagination, says, “Education is a ceaseless struggle to maintain creativity in the face of experience.”²¹  Students trying to complete themselves in a “harmonious and many-sided manner,” who are trying to creatively contribute to the world, are challenged by experiences that reconfigure them in ways that don’t feel secure.²²  The students in my English classes tend to register our subject matter inert, due to the system’s refusals to utilize, test, or throw into fresh combinations what we examine.²³  My very capable students have not been challenged enough and struggle to rise to expectations due to trauma-mind, monotone listening, and an inability to self-advocate in the school setting.  After their first years in college, former students communicate that they needed to think about speaking into their educational development sooner, that high school merely graduated them instead of insisting on a more “complete achievement of expressing one’s potential in the face of one’s actual environment.”²⁴  While I believe that my students are fully engaged with culture on their own account, this unit wants students to understand one of the systems, schooling, that shapes their lives.  Then, perhaps, they could more readily merge their personalities with something beyond themselves, while serving a very personal vision.²⁵ 

I want my students struggling with questions like, “Do I agree with my own schooling?” and “Am I learning?” and “What is education to the limit?” and “What is adolescence in relationship to childhood?” and “How do we reform our public schools?”

This unit’s standards orbit media literacy, visual literacy, technology skills to create a product, and author’s purpose and audience effects,. Also, because I teach older high school students, key skills of synthesis, remembering, and pattern-finding across and between texts, become an added focus.  I have long looked to Alfred North Whitehead’s “Rhythm of Education” to advise curriculum design; he teaches that true education moves from Romance to Precision to Generalization, but we could just as easily say from Freedom to Discipline to Freedom.²⁶  I hope that teaching fresh films (the vividness of novelty) covers Romance, that teacher and students pointing at and comparing films and clips covers Precision, and that the relevant techniques we gain lead to Generalization through imaginative and artistic exercises.²⁷  Education resists falling under one epistemology, but the following aims are an approximation for how I envision education serving society best:

• the larger liberal arts project to witness and prepare free citizens who have full and equal participation in social life…
• the even larger democratic political project for which young people need independent and critical thinking, personal and collective development, participatory involvement, consensual practices, and healthy, internalized limits of the necessity of stratification and hierarchies based on expertise or experience…²⁸
• the still larger human project of reconciling how we are different within an affirming community and how we are no different from anything else, unselfishly identifying with a wider spectrum of life, becoming “visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others”...²⁹

…and if we anticipate that citizens like these are the kind of people we want to live with, and we resist holding one image of the ideal citizen too clearly in our minds, freedom might move to become  the guiding principle of the American public school system.³⁰

And I am thinking that big.  Our goals must be worthy and radical, so even when compromising, we progress.³¹  Just as films are large-scale negotiations, so too is democracy.  Film can package information in an emotional way and bring warmth to the problems and solutions of democracy.³²  We need our emotional side to reason, and we continue to struggle for perfection fusing reason and imagination.³³

I am pleased with how well film unites the kinds of texts and thinking we flex as English scholars.  As we interpret (observe, describe, respond, and connect) films, what the filmmaker intended is not an endpoint; the work itself extends its author’s knowledge.³⁴  As critics and commentators, we “share in the promotion of the active process of what the filmmaker went through in producing the work,” and the imagination this requires allows us to participate in culture, embody and advance knowledge, and develop skills.³⁵  We must help students make films themselves, even if only with their imaginations.³⁶  The whole point of being critical is self-consciousness; interpretation and analysis are not the end but a step toward a product, an initiation into action.³⁷  Interpretation, itself preparation for democracy, is the same as judgment when students exercise their imaginations.³⁸