1. Education and Popular Culture

2. Objectives
Describe the popular culture of the 1920s
Explain why the youth-dominated decade came to be called the Roaring Twenties

3. Schools and the Mass Media Shape Culture
Schools Enrollments
1,000,000
College bound students
1914
4,000,000
Broad range of courses
vocational courses
1926

4. Schools and the Mass Media Shape Culture
Schools Enrollments (cont.)
Expanding News Coverage
Immigrant children
Teachers had to meet this new demand
Cost of Education
Doubled between 1913 – 1920
Doubled again 1920 – 1926
$2.7 billion a year
Newspaper circulation rises
Local papers begin to be swallowed up by national chains

5. Schools and the Mass Media Shape Culture
Radio Comes of Age
Shared national experience
“tune in” on the “airwaves”
The President
The World Series

6. America Chases New Heroes and Old Dreams
Leisure Time
Sports Stars
$4.5 billion spend on entertainment in 1929
Gertude Ederle
1st woman to swim the English Channel
Babe Ruth
New York Yankees’ Home Run King
Andrew “Rube” Foster
“Father of Black Baseball”
Helen Wills
7x Women’s singles champ at the U.S. Open

7. America Chases New Heroes and Old Dreams
Lindberg’s Flight
Entertainment and the Arts
33 hour 29 minute transatlantic flight
New York to Paris – The Spirt of St. Louis
$25,000 Prize for the solo flight
Huge party in Paris
Ticker tape parade in NYC
Movies
The Jazz Singer
Steam Boat Willie
Talkies
George Gershwin
Merged classical and jazz
Georgia O’Keeffe
Edward Hopper

8. America Chases New Heroes and Old Dreams
Writers of the 1920s
Considered one of the richest eras in country’s literary history
Sinclair Lewis
1st American Noble Prize winner in literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Jazz Age”
The Great Gatsby
The Lost Generation
Gertrude Stein
Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises
A Farewell to Arms

9. How did public high school play a role in preparing students for the future?
How did various forms of media help to shape American culture in the 1920s?
Which heroes and events inspired Americans during the 1920s?
What new styles did writers, artists, and composers experiment with in the decade?
How did the literature of the time express a clash of values within society?