Mad Men and the Curricular Pastiche of Nostalgia

• In Event: Maddening Lessons: Critical Engagements With Mad Men and Curriculum Thought

Abstract

The narratives of office life abound since at least Melville’s Bartleby the Scribner, but schools contain an affective recollection of institutionalization that goes on without irony or interruption. This paper will describe these scenes, in and out of memory and make believe, and show how Mad Men can only be understood through the lens of school-day absurdity, imitating what seems to be culture but may only be smoke.

I asked my students, “What is it about Mad Men? I think I love it, but I don’t get it.” Then I lit up a Lucky Strike and squinted through the measure exhale of smoke and sipped my cold beer. I didn’t really do that, but the imaginary progression describes something about the affect of Mad Men that is its most constitutive element. I asked my students, “What is Mad Men about?” One of them, a middle-aged German woman, said softly, “All the smoking, I just adore it. Everyone smokes.” Everyone seemed to agree, even those who didn’t smoke and didn’t like smoking. There was something about the smokiness of the series that had to do with what it was about. “The clothes,” another student said. The mood at the pub table moved into something almost pensive but not ponderous. It was as if there was a sense that the world of Man Men—not the literal, historical, or political world—was gone forever.

When we look at the language of schools, from policy to administration to teaching, there is something very similar, if not identical to Mad Men. Today many lament the loss of teacher agency and blame neoliberalism for privatizing public schools into shells of their former progressive selves. This is, of course, highly oversimplified, but the school narrative has more depth when considered through the hazy question of what Mad Men might be about. This nostalgic pastiche of mourning and delight from a distance grasps at a curricular question, “What knowledge of is of most worth?” The knowledge worth its very existence is the one, it seems, that has a certain poetic transmissive capacity to replicate a dream world of affect, color, and smoke. This may seem remote to discussions of schooling, but there is perhaps no greater caricature of itself in this regard than the school of today. Indeed, Mad Men is a fairly modest bit of nostalgia by comparison to the ritualized school, universally understood and recognized.

The usual analytic route is to use pop culture to make sense of schooling and curriculum, but in this case the direction must be reversed. At that pub table, sitting with graduate students over beer and appetizers and something approaching ordinary talk, there was a collective sense that this was our Mad Men, this time and place that seems fleeting if not gone in the institution we live and work in, but long gone—extinct—in the schools of children and teenagers.

Author

• Samuel Rocha, The University of British Columbia