Freedom Writers: Truly no child left behind
Freedom writers is a film written and directed by Richard LaGravanese in 2007, the
movie is about school-life during early 90’s and based on the book Freedom
writers diary. All story is set after two years since Los Angeles riots during which
minority neighborhoods exploded following the acquittal of the police who had
brutally beat Rodney King provoking such aggressive civilian environment that’s
transported and reflected in school.!
Erin Gruwell, a 23-years-old novice teacher, steps into room 203 at the Long
Beach, California, secondary schools, what’s strokes is the mixed population that
attends the class made up of arican americans, latinos, asian and white freshmen
who are considered by all teaching body as "unteachables", they come out from a
reality composed by homelessness, drugs, racism and trouble situations that
invest inner dimension of guys making them so agressive and involved in a silent
civil war which, generally, is battled during school-days by many students who
want to conquere the status of "original gangster" in the hood of juvenile
community.!
At the beginning, Erin's teaching methods have being seen such ridicolous and
inappropriated by the headmaster and all her collegues and students then she's
provoked beyond control, so she decides to make up a new model of teaching
based on literature and reality making links between literature's themes and social
matters which regard in first person her students so Shakespeare’s Montagues
and Capulets become modern-day Latino and Asian gangs, and Anne Frank,
victim of the Holocaust, gets adopted as one of the pupils’ own. Taking the place
of OGs are new heroes like Miep Gies, who courageously hid the Frank family from
the Nazis during World War II, and Jim Zwerg, a white 1960s civil rights activist
beaten to within an inch of his life for defying bus segregation in the Deep South.
“Miepmania” rules as students become inspired by the words of writers like Ralph
Waldo Emerson: “Who so should be a man, must be a nonconformist.”!
every student is becoming ispired to withe a diary where he or she can write down
whatever feels and how he wants; as the “unteachables” coalesce intellectually
and emotionally, they adopt the group name of Freedom Writers, in honor of
Freedom Riders like Jim Zwerg who rode buses to challenge the limits of
intolerance.!
Director LaGravanese is aware that "freedom writers" is uncreative because it has
a closer connection with reality, indeed, all cast members are from similar origins
as film characters but what is striking is the messagge of the importance of
education in young's life and how school can change and can make some
changements to new generation's life. However, the film stand against Bush’s
odious and misnamed No Child Left Behind Act in favor of an egalitarian view of
education, bringing to mind an outlook championed so passionately by the
remarkable American educator Horace Mann who believed in Universal Education
can counter-work this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of
labor in favor of people's palingenesis.!
