“The Teacher's Unexpected Bath”: Plumbing the Meaning of Mayhem in the Celluloid Schoolroom

Abstract

Since the late 1930s, cinematic depictions of schooling have generally affirmed the necessity of school as a social institution and underscored the importance of formalized education for children and youth. Movies ranging fromGoodbye, Mr. Chips(1939) toDead Poets Society(1989) have represented school as a place of tradition and order, and films such asThe Corn Is Green(1945);Blackboard Jungle(1955);Good Morning, Miss Dove(1955);Up the Down Staircase(1967); andStand and Deliver(1988) have portrayed teachers as heroic figures. It could seem that the film industry has always portrayed schooling in idealistic terms. But that is not the case. This essay examines the familiar cultural genre of films about schooling, but it does so by looking backward beforeBlackboard Jungle, even beforeGoodbye, Mr. Chips, to the first four decades of cinema—a period when schooling was rendered not as a necessity, but as a joke.