Cultural Encounter: Waiting For Superman
Up until this point in my life, I have only attended private schools; so, on Friday when I went to the theaters to view Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting For Superman, I was more than a little taken aback from what I saw. Beyond the startling statistics regarding the nation’s public schools presented every so often, lied the stories of five children, who despite their inner yearning to learn were stuck in situations beyond their control, namely their compulsory enrollment in some of the worst public schools in the country.
What I had always taken for granted, the parents of the children portrayed in the documentary would have given anything for, and their efforts are chronicled in attempts at charter school admission. What’s more however is that the children were strikingly similar to my little brother in both age and interests, for instance, several were eight years old, enjoyed superheroes and one wore similar SpongeBob pajamas, and one little girl, Daisy expressed her desire to be a veterinarian, just like my little brother. If anything, the film put faces to the problem of public schools, and I found myself unable to remain a detached viewer. In the end, the film got me to think just how different a path in life that my little brother will lead from his counterparts in the documentary.
Certainly, we all would like to think of ‘culture’ as being differences that make us unique, unfortunately there are also disadvantages to certain ways-of-life as documented in the film, and it just makes me more thankful for the opportunities that I have been given, and eager to see the same opportunities given to others as well.
2 comments
Peter, you make a good point, and you’ve got me interested in this film. I’ve spent my whole life in public schools, and usually they were the better ones of the lot. However, they all had trends of poor discipline and a failure in stressing ethics. I wonder if common sense ethics have made way into the documentary’s attempt at describing the harsh environment of the school. Perhaps it is a consensual social hesitance to teach (or indoctrinate) morals in public schools, as I have often heard parents yelling at teachers for “trying to do their job and raise their kids.”
I always thought that anything against the schools was an attack on the union and therefore a capitalist plot to privatize the school system. I still believe that Bill Gates and Bloomberg want to destroy the union and turn all public schools private but this movie might be worth a look. Also, people like Bloomberg and Gates refuse to fund failing schools, which makes them even worse.