On August 27, 1862, the much-loved crown prince and heir apparent to the throne of the Kingdom of Hawai'i died tragically and inexplicably at the tender age of four. Prince Albert Edward Kauikeaouli Kaleiopapa, the beloved child of a long line of chiefs, was the only son of Alexander Liholiho (Kamehameha IV) and Emma Na'ea (Queen Emma). He was believed to be the last child to be born to a reigning Hawaiian monarch and the last hope of the Kamehameha Dynasty. Adored by the Hawaiian public, his birth was celebrated for days throughout the islands. Likewise, his untimely death was mourned for years to come as it left his parents heartbroken and the Hawaiian nation without a constitutionally recognized heir. One of the Hawaiian newspapers is quoted as saying, “The death of no other person could have been so severe a blow to the King and his people.” The following year, the King himself died of grief and despair.

Since the late 1930s, cinematic depictions of schooling have generally affirmed the necessity of school as a social institution and underscored the importance of formalized education for children and youth. Movies ranging from Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) to Dead Poets Society (1989) have represented school as a place of tradition and order, and films such as The Corn Is Green (1945); Blackboard Jungle (1955); Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955); Up the Down Staircase (1967); and Stand and Deliver (1988) have portrayed teachers as heroic figures. It could seem that the film industry has always portrayed schooling in idealistic terms. But that is not the case. This essay examines the familiar cultural genre of films about schooling, but it does so by looking backward before Blackboard Jungle, even before Goodbye, Mr. Chips, to the first four decades of cinema—a period when schooling was rendered not as a necessity, but as a joke.

Alone in her last phase of life, Sarah McComb copied a poem onto the back of a postcard that read, “And now… what wait I for? No home, no welcome, nobody who needs me; no love, to which in my loneliness I can turn. And now… what wait I for?” She died in January 1937, not long after she “fell and broke her thigh” the previous December. She was ninety-one years old. Her hospital bills and funeral invoice, like most of her expenses, were sent to her brother's daughter. Her old-age dependency on extended kin, however, was not inevitable. As a single, childless, white middle-class woman, Sarah had supported her independence through itinerant teaching, traveling the American west including Alaska, with additional adventures to Guatemala and Cuba. As she approached her sixties, she pursued alternative strategies for income, intensifying her efforts to earn a profit through business ventures while continuing to teach for as long as she could. Despite her determination, Sarah faced old age without savings of her own; she would not be able to finance her independence once she stopped teaching. When that time finally came, she was seventy-six years old and had to turn to her brother for help. Securing his support, however, was a proposition fraught with familial tension and personal anxiety. Although women like Sarah valued their independence, they struggled to carry this independence into old age.

Dallas T. Herndon, the first director of the Arkansas History Commission and State Archives in Little Rock, opened his short study on the conditions of Arkansas's mountain schools in the 1910s by writing that he was “fully convinced… that no such extreme backwardness in reality exists anywhere in Arkansas as to be found in the most isolated parts of such states as Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.” Herndon followed this statement with a comical story he had heard about a conversation between a Georgia mountaineer and a “traveler from the outside world.” The traveler, he told, asked the mountaineer if he knew who President Woodrow Wilson and John Slayton, the governor of Georgia, were. The mountaineer openly replied that he did not. Taken aback by such ignorance, the stranger then asked the mountaineer if he knew God. The Georgia mountaineer answered, “Yes, I think I'se heard uf him; his last name be's Damn, ain't it?” Herndon was sure that in the Arkansas hills, no one could find a “man, woman or child who is quite so ignorant as that Georgia mountaineer…”