Wakeley, Kieran McCluskey;
(2024)
Corporate Classrooms: Sponsored Film and the Shaping of the American Curriculum.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis reconstructs an archival history of the sponsored educational film industry and its role in shaping both students and the U.S. political economy. It scrutinises the institutions and agendas that informed its growth and investigates the consequences of government and business using film to shape the conduct of populations under the guise of educational practice. From the end of the Great Depression to the early years of the Cold War a confluence of new technologies, ideological imperatives, and business opportunities attracted the attention of the U.S. government, the most powerful industrial corporations in the world, and the influential advocacy groups that represented them. Capitalising on the capacity of film to standardise and widely disseminate simple and effective messages, industry and government extended their policy objectives to include the ideological management of school children. While economic hardship led school boards and local government to turn to film to help ease the strain on an expanding education system, films were produced that visualised a model citizenry largely in the interests of sustaining industrial capital. This research aims to achieve several significant objectives: To examine classroom film beyond an understanding of educational utility, analysing how it was being used to influence the thoughts and behaviours of American youth. To explore the historical entanglement of corporate sponsorship, and the role it played in bridging the gap between advertising and educational film. And to situate classroom films within the context of America’s burgeoning global power by examining the motivations of government in dovetailing educational initiatives with, and for the benefit of foreign policy. At the core of this thesis is an argument that the overt endorsement by these films of consumerism, individualism, nationalism, free enterprise, and anti-communism, aided in the radicalisation of liberalism, and contributed to the later emergence of neoliberalism as an economic-political reality.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Corporate Classrooms: Sponsored Film and the Shaping of the American Curriculum |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > CMII |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10193830 |
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