Audience Member
The thing is, a lot of the things that are supposed to make me feel all inspired by this movie just make me angry at the teacher. He seems, to me, to be using peer pressure and shame to get the results he wants. He does not understand the concept of "age-appropriate literature." "Treat 'em like adults; they'll be fine," as the filmmaker puts it in the special features, is not actually the best way to treat kids, especially when it comes to their reading choices. Oh, we've apparently come to the cultural decision that [i]Huckleberry Finn[/i] is children's literature, much as that would terrify Twain himself. But I really don't think [i]Of Mice and Men[/i] is a good book for ten-year-olds to read. It's not that I don't think they have the reading abilities for Steinbeck. Steinbeck is not all that difficult. What he is, however, is [i]complicated[/i]. We haven't done [i]Of Mice and Men[/i] yet, because, you know, "O." But I was a very bright, very mature ten-year-old, and I'm really not sure I could have gotten a lot of the emotional nuance. And since not all of these kids are of above-average intelligence and maturity, that's a problem.
Rafe Esquith teaches fifth graders at an inner city elementary school in Los Angeles. A lot of these kids do not come from the most intellecutally stimulating homes--though Rafe's only requirement, more on which anon, seems to be that the are first-generation Americans who still speak their native language at home. And he takes these kids into his special class with its special rules, and he dumps them headlong into learning. They read grown-up books, they start doing real math, they learn anything the teacher thinks they should, and they do all kinds of fantastic extracurricular activities. Including putting on a production of [i]Hamlet[/i] to an audience, also more on which anon. We are meant to be hugely inspired by this.
But, you know, I kept comparing him to Jaime Escalante, also in inner city Los Angeles. Rafe chooses his own kids; well, Escalante did at first. But Escalante didn't [i]limit[/i] his kids by what their families were like. He chose them based on his belief that they could handle calculus. Rafe flat-out says that he only lets a certain social class of kids into his class, and I think we're supposed to admire him for it. I think we're only supposed to look at the fact that, bluntly, he's assimilating these kids into being good, productive Americans. But if there are poor black kids in that neighbourhood, they're left out, because their family speaks English at home. White kids. Heck, even Asian and Hispanic kids whose grandparents were the immigrants, whether the family speaks English at home or not! And I don't think Rafe really sees the problem with this, or the filmmaker, either.
And let's talk about those great extracurricular projects. He takes his class on two field trips every year; the class we see goes to the Black Hills and Washington, D.C. They have parties. They go to colleges--well, that one I accept, especially given that USC, among others, is technically an inner city school. But it's just Rafe's kids. There's a foundation of former students now who get in on this, and it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that maybe expanding the base of classes might be better than giving even more things to this one group. Maybe a second class of kids, even at a different school, could be added, even if it means that Rafe has to pick between the Black Hills and Washington, D.C. Maybe his former students could raise money to improve the other classes in the school. Maybe if [i]all[/i] the kids in the school, or a bunch of kids in a bunch of schools, had these benefits, it would be better than lavishing two trips and a bunch of parties on these fifty kids. And maybe, just maybe, the reason the kids are crying at the end has a lot to do with the fact that they are moving on to places where they aren't going to have these sorts of benefits. Rafe says at one point that the presents he gives them for Christmas might be the only ones they get that year--doesn't he consider that knowing they won't even get that the next year is something that would make a fifth-grader sad?
The other thing this makes me think of is one of the first movies we covered here--[i]OT[/i]. I think it was even presented by the same documentary company. That was also about a lot of kids who were doing something that they weren't expected to be able to do because they were "just" inner city kids. (And I didn't much like that teacher, either.) But Sir Ian McKellan and Michael York didn't show up there. The kids putting on [i]Our Town[/i] were doing it more for their community. They show us the audience for a couple of the performances, and those weren't people from the neighbourhood. A lot of those kids were immigrants, too, and they were also putting on a play outside their experience. But they weren't cute little kids putting on Shakespeare. They were teenagers putting on a work of American literature of their own century. They were also a lot more aware of what they were doing and a lot harder to patronize.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
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