(DOWNLOAD) "Puberty Blues and the Representation of an Australian Comprehensive High School (Report)" by History of Education Review # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Puberty Blues and the Representation of an Australian Comprehensive High School (Report)
- Author : History of Education Review
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 208 KB
Description
An examination of cinematic representations of Australian education over time forms one of author's ongoing projects. This line of research overall is based on a number of foundational questions, the most basic of which is: what can the study of film add to historical research and the writing of history about education in Australia? So far my studies have suggested a number of points. First, in collecting the details of Australian films that concern education, youth and childhood (not yet complete), I have established that Australian school education has been a well visited topic for Australian film-makers. This fact points to the importance of schooling as an institution in the national life, an importance not so readily represented in the wider writing of Australian historical narratives. In another study I have shown how cinematic representations of nineteenth century schools were linked in the 1970s to explorations of Australian national identity. (1) Further in a recent study of silent screen images of education from the turn of the century until 1930, I have argued that images of mass education (graphically conveyed for example by busy playgrounds and massed children) in the opening decades of the twentieth century were an important way to imagine the modernising society. Schooling was represented as a field of desire for national fitness, order and fulfilment in these early films. (2) My hypothesis at this early stage of the project regarding the question 'what can the study of film add to historical research and the writing of history about education in Australia?' is that cinema offers education historians access to powerful vernacular cinematic imaginings about the nature, role and impact of education in Australia, and in studying these representations over time, we should be able to outline changes and continuities in these imaginings. Analyses of filmic representations then should amplify and, perhaps modify, what has been claimed by more conventional historical methodologies based on static forms of evidence. In this article I examine one film, Puberty Blues, directed by Bruce Beresford in 1981. According to the Australian Film Commission, the film is number forty four of the top Australian films at the Australian Box Office from 1966 to 2005 having earned over three million dollars. The view put here is that this film throws light on the history of the comprehensive coeducational high school at a particular moment. (3) The article maintains that Puberty Blues pursues a damning representation of the ineffectual and irrelevant nature of school life for the students it features. This unsettling film shows the comprehensive coeducational secondary school, itself a product of a middle class vision of the civil society, to be failing in its promise of extending 'respectable' and materially aspirant middle class values to youth. It is suggested that the decline in patronage of the public coeducational comprehensive school by the middle class and aspiring others may in part be attributable overall to the powerful negative images of schools such as those in Puberty Blues that have widely circulated in Australian and Anglophone popular culture, especially in feature film. (4) It also hypothesises that the middle class flight from the comprehensive high school may be in part attributable to the fact that some of their children may have 'deserted' the schools first.
 "Puberty Blues and the Representation of an Australian Comprehensive High School (Report)" by History of Education Review # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}