Similarities of School in Media
There are a profuse amount of similarities in media that is centered on high school, college, and all of their functions. A huge similarity in media about school is the presence of some type of social hierarchy. There’s jocks, nerds, drama kids, and preps along with many others. Some of the most popular movies, songs, books and TV shows show this as a part of high school. The movies Mean Girls and High School Musical are totally centered on this idea. In Mean Girls there is a huge war between the popular kids (plastics) and the rest of the school population. Everyone is always trying to get back at the plastics and vice versa. In High School Musical a relationship is destroyed because of clique differences. Cliques define whom you can date in High School Musical. The social hierarchy is central to most movies about high school.
Mean teachers are very prevalent in media about school. For example, in the book Speak, there is a teacher that the students have named “Mr. Neck”. He patrols the halls giving out detention and heckling kids who are tardy. When he teaches he is a relentless dictator, giving out F’s without reason. In the show Drake and Josh on Nickelodeon, Drake’s math teacher always gives him F’s regardless of circumstances. She is also a very negative person, always handing out detentions and discipline. In my experience in education, I’ve never come across a complete devil teacher as the media portrays it.
A corrupt administration seems to be a staple of popular media about school. In the show Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, the administration is always trying to make the kids miserable by canceling events and cutting classes. They don’t care about the student population. All they care about is the money side of the education system. In the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the principal of the school tries to expel, suspend, and, discipline Ferris because of a personal grudge. He only thinks of himself when dealing with other people and is typically very cruel and inconsiderate. Overall, media portrays school administration as very corrupt and greed people.
Uniqueness of School in Media
The book Speak is unique in the way that it portrays high school. There are some portrayals in the book that are standard throughout media, but the main message is totally unique. The book follows a girl named Miranda who has just entered high school as a freshman. At an end of the summer party, she called the cops because a senior boy had raped her. Everyone at the school ostracized her for what she did and she walked around the halls without a single friend. Nobody knew why she called the cops, only that she did. Speak really captures how cruel high school can be for a person that doesn’t fit in or conform to the standard ideology. Popular media portrays high school bullying as a joke. Bullying is looked at as something that’s not that bad and isn’t that hurtful. Speak really shows the psychological and physical damage that bullying and exclusion can do to a person. Bullying does happen and it is an extremely serious problem.
A final unique piece of media that is centered on school is the song Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd. Popular media may paint school in negative light, but almost all American media says that you need an education to be successful. The song’s opening line is, “We don’t need no education”. It paints a very dark picture of school, stating that it is pointless and not worth your time. It also says that school is a form of mind control, teaching you to a certain ideology. It states that we are all conforming to certain views and are “all just bricks in the wall” of our school and a bigger society. There aren’t any other single pieces of media that portray formal education and school in such a dark way.
Consequences
The media is teaching us about a lot of things regarding school. It teaches us that teachers are mean, the administration is corrupt, and that there is a big social hierarchy in schools. It also portrays students as lazy troublemakers. Some of these portrayals contain a lot of truth, but some are far from it. Simultaneously, media also strays from the standard representation of school. Most of these representations deal with the psychological damage that can be done to a person as they work their way through the school system. These portrayals can lead to some very wrong assumptions about the education system.
There are huge consequences to the way the media represents anything. They form the viewpoints of school for a mass audience. They have helped form a distrustful and negative viewpoint of school and all of its functions. People distrust the students because they see large amounts of cheating and lying in movies. They think that teachers don’t care about their students and repeatedly fail them because that’s what they see in the media. The coverage and brutality of the Columbine shooting caused the creation of the lockdown drill. If Columbine wasn’t covered in the way that it was covered, schools wouldn’t have that drill. The media has shaped the world of school and it’s hard deviate from that point of view. The media is completely shaping our society’s view of the world and are controlling our minds in a way. The ways in which they represent things are the ways in which we see the world. This can be good if these representations are the wholesome truth, but as many people know, the media isn’t completely honest all of the time.
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