ABSTRACT
Walt Disney theme parks are, more than anything else, teaching tools. They provide a vast yet carefully integrated set of lessons and ‘new knowledge’ designed to shape a particular set of norms and values (Bryman, 2004; Fjellman, 1992; Hermanson, 2005). In fact much of the pleasure derived from the Disney theme park experience as well as the success of the parks is due to the teaching that goes on in them and our desire to be taught by Disney. This relationship between teaching and pleasure helps explain why we are willing to pay such a high price to participate in the theme park experience. By the time Walt Disney decided to build Disneyland in the middle of the twentieth century he had begun to recognize not only the teaching power of the theme park experience as a way to help shape values and norms, but also the most effective ways to do so. His work in animation and propaganda, particularly during World War II and immediately afterward, taught him how his products could be tools for shaping attitudes and perceptions. After the early 1950s Disney’s interests shifted from just providing his audience animated entertainment to focusing film and television products to explicitly teach his corporate curriculum about nature, science, history, cultures, and gender, subjects that ultimately allow for the definition of what it means to be a good person and a good citizen. Sammond (2005) argues that after the mid-1950s “the term educational may have referred to a common … perception (or Disney’s hope) that everything they [The Walt Disney Company] produced was educational” (p. 313).
