Education continues to operate as an enclave of elite culture and is battling for interest and respect with the mass media, technology, and the popular arts. These cultures must be brought together. Using the creative ideas generated by theme parks is an effective method of importing popular culture into the schools. Theme parks provide a total learning environment and are highly successful as evidenced by 50 million visitors a year. For an audience raised on television, they provide an ideal setting for education, offering innovations for the classroom and combining fantasy, history, adventure, and learning. The classroom cannot compete with the world of popular culture with its creative imagination and enormous resources. Theme parks influence design, merchandising, and computer-assisted education, serving as modern museums and centers of historic preservation, where children can acquire history, lore, and myth. As a major acculturation method, theme parks are evocative as opposed to literal and make participants out of the viewer. They are knowledge clusters of exhibits, science, and communications; and they provide a visual, tactile, and kinetic message about recent scientific information. A review of scholarly literature published on theme parks and a discussion of concepts and influences concludes the document. (NL)