Schooling's golden rule days on Hollywood's silver screen: Metaphoric 're-presentation' of schooling in films of the 1920s and 1930s

Through analysis of the attempted communicative content (linguistic and visual metaphors) of selected popular American films containing situational contexts relating to school (including college and college life), released during the 1920s and 1930s, an (one) interpretive cultural "model" of schooling is constructed. The method used is a synthesis of poststructural media studies and the cognitive anthropological approach of cultural modeling applied to the historical object of American movies. As a result, this work uses a two stage analysis process. The first stage consists of summarizing a film's plot, a sample of contemporary reviews, and my critical reading of the film's narratives or text.;The examination of those narratives' communicative metaphors consists of collecting the metaphors used to communicate about schooling and then analyzing those metaphors in the context of their presentation (that is, the films the metaphors are contained within), producing a cultural understanding or model of schooling.;Several examples are given where the primary conclusion of this analysis is compared and contrasted to an "academic" model of the purposes and function of schooling. One such example is the comparison of the academy's definition of the purpose of college and college's purpose within the popular cultural model. From academe's perspective (both present and historical), college is for acquiring the attitudes and behaviors that will make us "better" people ("education" as in "higher education"). Yet the films portray students (the protagonists) as already having those qualities (attitudes and behaviors) when they arrive at college. College, then, is the site where those values and behaviors are challenged, and the student "triumphs" by holding to those values and behaviors in the face of temptations experienced within the college environment. The experience of college does not give or instill these "greater" human values, instead it attempts to undermine them.;The implications of this work are the construction of alternative starting points from where other paths examining relations between and amongst the members of American culture and institutions of American culture can proceed.