American Education in Popular Media

"Jocks, freaks, and nerds. Cheerleaders and homecoming queens. Buffoonish teachers and dictatorial principals. If you went to an American school, you remember all of these character types. But your memories are shaped by powerful media images, dating back at least a century. Sevan Terzian and Patrick Ryan have brought together the best recent scholarship on depictions of school in literature, film, television, and music. These fine essays shed new light on our shared educational past, even as they remind us how often our mass media have distorted it." - Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of Education and History, New York University, USA

"Make some popcorn, find your favorite chair, and ease into this delightful collection of essays charting the historical evolution of popular portrayals of American schooling. Whether in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post or through the celluloid splendor of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, American mass media have both reflected and shaped popular understandings public education in American life. The essays in this volume critically engage that process through a variety of theoretical lenses." - Benjamin Justice, Associate Professor of Education and History, Rutgers University, USA

"Readers beware. This book will sneak up on you. Collecting chapters by relentlessly innovative, imaginative, and insightful scholars, editors Sevan Terzian and Patrick Ryan, no slouches themselves on the intellectual leadership front, have produced a no-holds-barred historical examination of American education in popular media. It helps us remember and rethink after all, we all went to school. And it exposes in provocative detail the durable imprint of media on the education of the public." - Donald Warren, Professor Emeritus, Education History and Policy, Indiana University, USA