Freedom Writers And Precious Knowledge: Film Analysis

According to Learning and Urban Education.com, urban education refers to the schooling system in metropolitan communities. They are typically diverse; characterized by large enrollments and high levels of complexity. Two films that depict narratives involving urban schools and the interaction between students and teachers are Freedom Writers and Precious Knowledge. The Hollywood produced movie, Freedom Writers, illustrate the diversity and partitioned setting of a typical urban schooling system. The schools are filled with at-risk teenagers who are deemed incapable of learning. Going down their current path, these students are on their way of dropping out of school. Erin Gruwell, a new incoming teacher, inspires her students to take an interest …show more content…
In Freedom Writers, The lower performing students were placed in classrooms that were rundown and poorly taken care of with lack of resources. In the school, the teachers and administration had no hope for their students. Woodrow Wilson High School is depicted as low income and racially segregated. In result, teachers and administrators do not believe in the students; the staff pf the school are uninvolved, do not show support, and refer to them as "unteachables.” In contrary, Mrs. Gruwell believes her students can learn and is determined to teach them; she is extremely involved with her students. The students in the movie we depicted as thugs and gang members who did not care about school or their education. Their only goal in life was to live. The community in the movie was the ghetto. There were gang fights and shootings that took place in the movie. The community is not involved, instead it is racially segregated and filled with …show more content…
According to Pew Research Center (2014), 31% of Arizona's population is Hispanic, which is the 4th most in the United States. This agrees with the fact their was mostly Hispanics in Tucson High School. 66% percent of Arizona's population spoke a language other than only English spoken at home, which is why they spoke spanish sometimes in their class. On the other hand, one could one could say that it gave an unrealistic representation to the motivation of the students in the high school. In the book “The American School,” Spring stated that “A survey of one Texas county in 1921 found only 30.7 percent of Mexican school-age children in school. In another Texas county in the 1920s, school authorities admitted that they enforced school attendance on Anglo children but not on Mexican children” (Spring, 2010, p.237). Education was not forced onto Mexican-Americans, but in Precious Knowledge, the teachers made sure that their students, who were mostly Mexican-American, were valued as students. Because of this, so many Mexican-Americans graduated and went on to continue their