Education (Documentaries) and Utopian Thinking

Abstract

This article examines three films that comment on public education in Germany. Berlin Rebel High School (Alexander Kleider, 2016 ), Die Kinder der Utopie (Hubertus Siegert, 2019), and Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse (Maria Speth, 2021 ) are German documentaries that present a critique of the current educational system and, at the same time, allow glimpses into classrooms that offer alternative educational models. All three films align themselves with the educational theories of utopian, radical, or critical pedagogies and embrace an approach to education that rejects the definition of a static end goal and emphasizes the unfinished, continuous nature of pedagogical practice. In the films’ examples, education’s utopian dimension resides in the process of striving for positive change, in the critical analysis of the present and the purposeful and collaborative action of learners and educators to change it for the better. The analysis of the formal, narrative, and paratextual strategies of the documentaries shows that critical hope is generated by the films on two levels, first, through the portrayal of concrete examples of alternative pedagogical practices and, second, through the films’ participation in the educational process.