This paper provides answers to three questions regarding Richard LaGravanese's motion picture Freedom Writers. The essay is meant to discuss in regard to reasons why teenagers were inclined to adopt particular attitudes and solutions that would be effective in turning them back on the right path. te paper also relates to subcultures who dominated society at the time and the influence that they had on children.
¶ … movie show hierarchy authority school, hierarchy affect social relationships? 2. Identify strategies Erin class overcome impersonality educational bureaucracy.
Freedom writers
Conditions at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach were critical at the time when the film's protagonist arrived. Students were unwilling to accept forms of authority and they generally perceived school as a formality. In spite of the fact that there was a strict form of hierarchy at this school, pupils were not provided with sufficient encouragement from the teachers and thus felt that it was pointless for them to subject to teachers in their school. General tendencies in the country make it difficult for teachers to actually express interest in doing their job and the fact that students are dedicating to making their lives contributes to influencing them in being reluctant to want to teach pupils.
One of the principal reasons for which these students are reluctant to cooperate with school authorities is the fact that society generally provides them with the feeling that they are not wanted. The fact that overall conditions in the country are critical when considering race-related crimes fuel them in maintaining this attitude and makes it difficult for them to understand matters from an objective point-of-view. The situation is actually very simple: society discriminates against them and they are unwilling to act in accordance with its rules. With no one to teach them in regard to the difference between right and wrong and concerning the importance of learning, these individuals feel that society has abandoned them completely.
Hierarchy is a controversial concept in this school, considering that students are mainly concerned about themselves and feel that there is no point in listening to authoritarian figures in the institution.
2. Erin gradually comes to acknowledge the fact that traditional education is unlikely to captivate the attention of her students and decides to employ unconventional techniques in trying to address them on a more personal level. These students have been accustomed to distant forms of teaching and have come to believe that their teachers are not necessarily interested in their well-being. As a result, they are uncooperative and they only attend school because they feel that it is their job to do so.
Erin realizes that racism is one of the core concepts keeping particular groups in her class together and uses this concept with the purpose of addressing them. She emphasize the wrongness in discriminating and uses the Holocaust with the purpose of demonstrating the evil that people can perform as a consequence of being provided with negative information. The teacher starts to feel that it is her mission to make these children understand the correct attitudes that they need to employ in order to live happy lives and gets actively involved in completing it by investing all of her resources into the campaign.
Through presenting her students with the horrible effects of discrimination Erin manages to have them comprehend that it is very wrong to employ discriminatory thinking. She takes the Holocaust as a main concept in her project because this is one of the most important examples of discrimination that one can possibly find in the history of mankind. The magnitude of this event is enough to make most people understand that it is wrong to differentiate individuals on the basis of their particularities and made it possible for them to express interest in wanting to understand each-other without employing prejudice in the process.
3. The 1990s Gang subculture is present throughout the movie and it makes it possible for viewers to get a glimpse of conditions in the U.S. during this period. Children were growing up listening to rap songs and seeing individuals in their neighborhood promote false values related to the importance of doing everything in order to protect one's honor. This influenced them in being unable to fully comprehend the nature of this subculture and fueled their tendency to put across extremist behavior.
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