Eighty Years On: Representations of Teachers and Schools in British Films, from 1930 to 2010 by Nicholas Johnson
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Eighty Years On: representations of teachers and schools in British films, from 1930 to 2010 by Nicholas Johnson A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY School of Education College of Social Sciences University of Birmingham 2011 79,992 words University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract Teachers are required to be reflective practitioners: that is, they must constantly assess and evaluate their performance, and its effectiveness. In addition, of course, they come under external scrutiny from government and parents. However, what of the way the public look at teachers? Teachers and schools may be read about in newspapers, comics and journals, discussed on television and the radio; they may even fall foul of social networking sites on the Internet. Popular films may be regarded as ninety-minute essays, presented dramatically for the entertainment of their audiences; the teacher or school film has been a staple of popular cinema in this country for almost eighty years. Moreover, the representations of teachers in British films have tended to retain a continuity of message despite the many changes that have taken place in education over this period. This thesis looks at those representations, and changes in education, and attempts to make connections, backed up with a philosophical approach that seeks to explain the visual turn in terms of successive orders of simulation. My hope is that new generations of teachers may reflect on the cultural heritage of which they, and their chosen profession, are very much a part. Acknowledgements. For philosophical contemplation, I am especially indebted to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations (1983) and Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (2000); for her lead in studying films as an insight into education, my thanks go to Mary M. Dalton and The Hollywood Curriculum (2007). For lending historical ‘backbone’ to this work, I would like to pay particular tribute to Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner (2004), Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden (1966), Gary McCulloch (1998), Peter Woods and Bob Jeffrey (2002) and Andy Hargreaves (1994). I have drawn inspiration from the work of my former tutor Professor Anthony Aldgate of the Open University whose work on film as historical artefact forms the blueprint of my methodology; from Dr Raymond McCluskey of Glasgow University for his enthusiasm, insight and energy; last, and by no means least, from my supervisor Professor Ian Grosvenor for his work in the vanguard of promoting the visual in the study of education, and his unstinting support, good humour and direction. For Frances and Rosa. Contents Chapter 1. Introduction. …………………………….................................... 2 The philosophy behind the methodology. ………………………………........ 9 Portraying ‘teacher‘. ……………………………….................................. 29 Education and image in the twentieth century. …………………………….. 33 Chapter 2. Schools for scandals: the thirties. ……………....................... 60 Chapter 3. A New England. ………………………………........................... 89 Chapter 4. Trials and Tribulations. ……………………………….................. 135 Chapter 5. A Little Light Relief: comic teachers and laughable schools……174 Chapter 6. Class War? The Long Sixties. ………………………………....... 202 Chapter 7. An End to Consensus. ………………………………................. 284 Chapter 8. Hogwarts and All. ………………………………........................ 321 Chapter 9. Teaching in a neo-conservative age. ……………………………. 346 Chapter 10. Conclusion: eighty years on. ………………………………......... 397 Continuity and change. ………………………………............................ 397 Market forces. ………………………………....................................... 402 Science and witchcraft. ………………………………............................ 410 The tyranny of the visual. ………………………………....................... 413 ‘I am a teacher’. ……………………………….................................. 425 Appendix Teacher roles …………….............................................. 430 Bibliography. ……………………………….............................................. 431 1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to eye and more open to observation. George Santayana (Goffman 1956: foreword) The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard claimed that our notion of reality is based upon simulations which we absorb from the culture in which we are all immersed. So, rather than reality being represented in simulation, our ‘reality’ is actually constructed from those simulations, and image is a ‘phantom of authenticity which always ends up just short of reality’ (Ward 1997: 71). Our society is now structured according to codes, says Baudrillard, which are neither natural, nor timeless, but which precede the real and ‘produce the real social order in which we all participate.’ We manufacture the ‘real’ because of simulation, and through panic seek the hyperreal ( Baudrillard 1983: 115, 146). The consequence for the postmodern world is that the previous ‘deep, authentic self’ has been lost in what Ward describes as ‘a recognition, and sometimes a celebration, of disintegration, fragmented desires, superficiality, and identity as something you shop for’ (Ward 1997: 120). ‘Image is now all that matters.’ Nobody invents their own identity, but in the postmodern world, we are invited to choose from a variety of different identities, rather like children taking their pick from a dressing-up box. Teacher identity, too, is a construct based upon images absorbed daily, from memories and experiences as pupils, of course, but also from representations in books, magazines and comics, TV and film. In this work, I am concerned with the representation of teachers and schools in British feature films. I will draw a parallel between changes in those representations and Baudrillard’s three orders of simulacra, linking both to changes in British education. The 'teacher film' is so ubiquitous and persistent as to deserve to be regarded, in my view, as its own genre (during the writing of this work, there arose a dozen new films worthy of mention; there will be others by the time this is read). I shall be looking at why the genre is so popular, and asking whether there is anything unique about British teacher films, as well as looking for evidence of continuity and change which might reflect shifts in society. And do these films have a contemporary relevance? Is there a cultural 2 longevity that allows us to say something about the time of their production, or is their significance 'time- bound'? Foucault maintained that authority in the post-Enlightenment age was procured by people governing their own behaviour beneath the all-seeing eye of the Panopticon: this might be God, or society, one's neighbour or Big Brother- an ‘infra-law’ nominally egalitarian but essentially ‘a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies’ (Rabinow 1991: 211-213). In this view, if people feel they are under scrutiny, their actions should adapt accordingly. School would perform the role of overseeing the young in the age when education became compulsory; it would control and correct before the imago of individual conscience, it is presumed, had developed. Whatever the local organization, mass schooling institutionalized the separation of children from society. School was a universalized space specifically designed to hold children. It was a space in which teachers developed their professional role, educating and disciplining the young. Control was in the buildings, the space created, and in the material contents of this space- furniture and equipment. Under the influence of school architecture the child was transformed into a schoolchild, into a subject of school culture (Burke and Grosvenor 2008: 65). Control derived from more than the architecture of the school, however. Edward Blishen saw despotism in schooling and observed that ‘…responsible people are not created by imposing rules of conduct upon them, without discussion. Any rule that is not freely accepted, after debate, is likely to breed sullenness, furtive evasion’ (in Harber 2009: 14). Harber cites Freire as claiming ‘all education is inherently political’ and that ‘any education offered as part of the existing system in an oppressive state and society will simply reproduce the ideas and interests of the oppressors’ (ibid: 17). Though Blishen and Freire were writing in the 1969 and 1970 respectively, things had actually got worse, according to Harber, in the subsequent forty 3 years: ‘Existing education systems for the majority seem permanently glued to current practices of curriculum, teaching and assessment which often damage learners and their societies’ (ibid: 141) and ‘over-testing’ had encouraged a ‘cramming of facts and [had created] an overwhelming dependency on extrinsic goals, rather than intrinsic ones’ (ibid: 146). Moreover, Avis (2003) suggested that the debate over evidence informed policy, the watchwords of the neo-conservative