ShareThisIt's back-to-school time again, and popular culture tells us that means trouble. High school, according to the 1955 movie "The Blackboard Jungle" (inspired by a novel by Evan Hunter), is nothing but classes of unruly teens brandishing switchblades and bad attitudes. The film, starring Glenn Ford, offers the same sensationalism, hyperbole and black-and-white moralizing of a Red Scare propaganda piece, and declares teaching as an on-the-job hazard.
To work in such environs surely takes an inspired and inspiring hero, which Hollywood has made a point of celebrating with films of fact and fiction:
"Dangerous Minds," "The Principal," "The Dead Poets Society," "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me," to name a few.
Our cultural view of educational institutions also informs us that schools are for developing a social pecking order that will last a lifetime ("The Breakfast Club," "Heathers," "Clueless," "Mean Girls" and TV's "Freaks and Geeks"); unabashed exploration of sex, booze and drugs ("Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "Superbad"); and even a sobering study in human behavior with high-schoolers as Third Reich-wannabes ("The Wave").
Schools don't have to be angst-driven, either. They can be a song-and-dance affair ala the popular "High School Musical" series and now Fox's wildly successful "Glee." And don't overlook the original high-school musical, "Grease," which remains so popular that it is touring theaters as a sing-along event.
In the early days of rock 'n' roll, school was cool ("Be True to Your School" by the Beach Boys and "Play It Cool, Stay In School" by Brenda Holloway), until teenage rebellion and guitar solos joined forces to distort our naive postwar image of the three R's later in the 1960s. Rock's view of school soured even more by the '70s, led by the call-to-arms chorus of "We don't need no education" in "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd, in which the band lyrically dressed down an antiquated educational system and its overly strict teachers bent on the mass production of young minds. Before that, '70s glam rocker Alice Cooper gleefully celebrated the summer hiatus from learning with "School's Out."
The 1980s found popular music taking a more playful approach to school with Van Halen's sexed-up classroom hit "Hot for Teacher," while The Police found inspiration in Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Lolita" with their own lyrical tale of a forbidden relationship, this involving a teacher and his student, in "Don't Stand So Close to Me."
But as rock rejected the paradigms of modern education, TV discovered comedy gold in such school-themed sitcoms as "Welcome Back, Kotter," "Hanging With Mr. Cooper," "Head of the Class" and "Saved by the Bell."
If nothing else, TV taught us that school is always good for a laugh.
(E-mail Kirk Baird at kbaird(at)theblade.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit the Toledo Blade
