Cinematic Schooling: Popular Learning at the Movies

This volume uses the metaphor of schooling to highlight the conviction that the widespread attention given to moving pictures in their various venues is not only diverting and entertaining, but also educative, although subtle and suggestive rather than explicit and didactic. The importance of our movie experience includes the inescapable fact of play-learning, which, for many people, becomes accumulative over time and consequential in our imagination of the world, as well as providing guidelines and cues for possible lines of action and codes of socially relevant beliefs. Most movies are not propaganda, but what is communicated onscreen can be incorporated into our ways of thinking and acting. Although this process is difficult to ascertain certainly, nevertheless, for those interested in the overwhelming impact of moving pictures as a component and source of our thinking and action, it deserves serious inquiry and invites social concern as to its power as an experience from which we learn who are and what we do.