It is a common assumption that popular media hold the potential to affect public perception. American Education in Popular Media: From the Blackboard to the Silver Screen interrogates the historical relationship between educational environments and the ways in which they are represented in popular media. Editors Sevan G. Terzian and Patrick A. Ryan present a diverse collection of essays, across a wide range of historical moments and variety of source materials. However, the editors have curated a communal sense of purpose throughout this volume. This collection questions the role of schooling in America, through an analysis of popular representations of students and educators in media. Contributors interrogate the potential of media to capture reality and equally to “suggest what students and educators are typically like – and how they ought to be” (9). However, importantly, what is ubiquitous is an awareness that popular media have a tendency to reinforce norms of social behaviour and educational expectations. The validity of Terzian and Ryan's introductory assertion that “popular media have frequently aligned with dominant social and political views in various ways” (3) is confirmed throughout the collection. American Education in Popular Media not only presents an account of popular media that features education but also is a vital archive of popular opinions in America over the course of the last century.

American Education in Popular Media is a chronological multimedia study that spans over a hundred years: the sources range from gentleman's magazines in the 1890s to the television musical comedy-drama show Glee in 2009. Whilst the ambition to discuss an entire century of schooling in a single collection might seem overambitious, the selected essays each comment on a specific historical moment. As a consequence, the reader of this volume does not suffer from travel sickness and is simultaneously able to obtain an overview of American education with the aid of a range of context-specific cases. Michelle Morgan's “‘A Touch of Risquity’: Teachers, Perception, and Popular Culture in the Progressive Era” (37–58) and Robert L. Dahlgreen's “Prosaic, Perfunctory Pedagogy: Representations of Social Studies Teachers and Training in the 1970s and 1980s Movies” (175–94) are the strongest examples of this approach. Morgan and Dahlgreen construct readings from a specific moment and use popular media to provide convincing expositions of dominant social norms. Dahlgreen's analysis of representations of disinterested teachers throughout the 1970s and 1980s is convincingly identified to be in direct relation to “a general sense of malaise in American society, largely due to a catalog of blows to the sense of American democracy and empire, including the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, the Watergate scandal, economics stagflation during the presidency of Jimmy Carter” (176). Media, and the everyday lives that it reflects and responds to, are intimately connected. American Education in Popular Media not only emphasizes that the study of cultural artefacts allows scholars to better understand the history of education, but also points to ways in which the media relates to the changes that can be observed in schools, colleges and universities today. Such an examination of the relationship between popular culture and personal experience is undoubtedly influential in a conception of American education in the past and present moments, but also can be useful when looking towards the future.

A key strength of American Education in Popular Media is its focus on the representation of teachers and educational administrators. This is an area which has previously been underdeveloped in other surveys of education in popular media. As Kate Rousmaniere observes in chapter 10, prior studies of popular representations of education offer “no more than a handful of such studies on images of school administration” (195). In fact, over half of the essays in this volume concentrate on teachers as opposed to students (See chapters 3–5 and also 8–10). With this focus, the volume draws attention to those who are underrepresented in popular culture, by pointing out “the scarcity of scenes of classroom instruction” (4) and the attraction of juvenile delinquents and high-school dropouts in lieu of more academically committed students. In facing up to these omissions in popular media, Terzian and Ryan prompt the question, what visions of education do cultural representations encourage? The essays in this volume are open-ended in their responses, but there is a sense that popular media acts as an uncomfortable archive. If popular media responds directly to a real-world history of education in America, it is a reflection that is in need of serious critical attention.