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Useful Notes / School Study Media

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These are works of fiction or nonfiction that people tend to study during their education. These are usually to be works that are considered cultural or historically significant, and thus important for students to learn about. They're also often used because they allow students to practice specific analytical skills. These works can serve as an introduction to concepts that might otherwise be difficult for students to understand, and therefore they tend to be broadly accessible and not overly experiment or avant-garde, especially for works taught at primary and secondary levels.

See also Small Reference Pools, as these works form a pool of well-known works.

Compare Lit. Class Tropes, which is about tropes you'd most likely study at school. Also compare From Entertainment to Education, for works that are used as educational material for other disciplines.


    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 

    Comic Books 
  • Fun Home: Common in classes studying LGBT issues.
  • Maus: Notable for being used in increasingly more history and literature classes despite being a graphic novel.
  • Persepolis

    Films — Animated 
  • Pixar films are used in some English classes to teach about storytelling. They even have a course at Khan Academy about this sort of thing. It can be found here.

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 

    Other 
  • Unix is widely studied in computer science classes, particularly those on operating system design.
  • AsapSCIENCE has become a staple in middle and high school science classrooms. Especially popular is their Periodic Table Song.

    Theatre 

    Video Games 
  • Bioshock has been used to showcase the detriments of unrestrained capitalism, i.e. Ayn Rand's own ideology on capitalism and the individual.
  • The Last of Us has been implemented in several textbooks for game narrative design and is making its way into writing classes.
  • Super Solvers
  • It's not uncommon to see Team Fortress 2 come up in lessons about video game character design.

    Web Animation 
  • OverSimplified: Some comments on the videos have said that the videos are shown in their classes.

    Web Videos 

    Western Animation 
  • As part of drug education programs like D.A.R.E., many people who attended elementary school in the '90s were shown Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue.
  • Schoolhouse Rock!: Made explicitly for this purpose in order to teach kids various concepts in the form of easily memorized song lyrics.
  • Disney:
    • In the late 1960's, six classic shorts were packaged into a series of educational reels for language arts and primary guidance courses. They were Three Little Pigs, The Tortoise and the Hare, Elmer Elephant, Little Hiawatha, The Ugly Duckling and Trick Or Treat.
    • In the 1970's, Disney produced the What Should I Do? series, had a formula of a group of kids getting into an argument over something and exploring their thoughts, opinions and potential choices regarding on the matter. The films were open-ended so the discussion could continue in the classroom.
  • It has become a bit of a cliche in many American schools to show Pocahontas, not because the film is historically accurate but because it's not — it's now a common film to use to teach students about how American history can be sanitized, Hollywood stereotypes about Native Americans, etc. as well as deconstructing a work of media more broadly.


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