Escape or Child Rule? The School as Space and Institution in Lesson Learnedand The Teachers’ Lounge

Abstract

Through the comparison of Bálint Szimler’s Lesson learned (2024) and İlker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge (2023) I would like to give a thorough reflection on the different tendencies in the contemporary politics of education. My main aim is to detect the movies’ critique of the current educational systems, as well as their take on what the idealistic school structure would look like. With the close analysis of the images used in the movies for depicting the space of the school, one can get a deeper understanding of the different approaches of these films. Next to the images of the school, I would also like to put emphasis on the attitudes of the teachers depicted in the movies, since their behavior and their point of view can give an insight into those alternatives which the films provide. Because of the main focus of this study, I relied on critical pedagogy as a theoretical background, as it allowed me to explore this topic from the perspective of critique of ideology.