Life and School

What I really appreciate about this documentary is the minimal narrative replaced more with personal questions that the filmmakers asked the principal and other people that, at least I as an audience member, would have liked to ask. One of the most touching and memorable shots was when Principal Bernie was asked whether the students will be able to overcome the great obstacle of their environment to ultimately become successful people, she was so saddened by the answer that she had a hard time saying it without tearing up. It angers her that these kids are not even given a chance, they are assumed to be stuck in a culture of poverty, that they will never overcome, and written off. And the documentarians do a great job to show this environment; we witness children picking up syringes, a situation requiring 15 police men at school dismissal time, and the state of the city in general (90% of the people in that neighborhood population lives in poverty.) Not only that, we see how this affects the children: drugs and violence are a regular part of their lives and they know all about it, and when the parents come in to meet with Ms. Bernie we are better able to understand where the problems some of these children exhibit come from. It is the school that tries to ameliorate these problems, teaching children the effects of drugs and to run for cover when a drug-related situation gets dangerous. The school is also a parent to these children whose parents are most often not present in a role of responsibility in their lives. It is up to principal Bernie and her staff to be the ones that show these children love, support, and inculcate a sense of belonging and pride in their abilities. But the children seem too much to handle for many of the teachers who have dealt with too many of them acting out. Many of the teachers also think that the children, lacking attention at home, bring that need to the classroom, and the good students, whose attention time is taken up by the disruptive students, act in ways that they can get that.

Mr. Cohtz does that believe that to be true, he fees that the students are not asking to be pampered but to be loved, respected, and understood. Mr. Cohtz is part of a strategic human experiment that came out of a need expressed by the experience of these children. He is assigned an all-boys class of disgruntled learners who lack a male role model or father figure in their lives. Mr. Cohtz believes that in order for his students to learn anything, they must first be able to feel a strong sense of pride for who they are. Mr. Cohtz class seems to be a lot more cooperative than any other class there was, discussing issues in a surprisingly mature way, not only in the manner in which they participate respectfully, but also in the impressive depth of their understanding. It seems that Mr. Cohtz’s class is a success, but we do not get to see more of it. This small pocket of success (the class) thrives within a larger island(the school) struggling for similar success, but while this class has Mr. Cohtz, the rest of the school seems to depend primarily on Ms. Bernie who obviously can not be as effective due to the number of students. The school is an island then, trying to stay afloat above the poverty that surrounds it.

The school struggles, but in the end, it loses its most valued believers, Principal Bernie, who could not continue to be effective at the school due to a lack of funding. In a way, although, it is no ones fault, the environment of poverty has been successful in keeping this school from becoming the transcendental tool that it can be for the children. It shows how complex an environment can be, that learning does not happen exclusively, that each student has a history and a life that comes with him wherever he/she goes. And to create a curriculum based on an understanding that school is separate from life and all its social factors is to doom the students and rob them of their promise. Stanton elementary tried, through principal Bernie and Mr. Cohtz, but to get funding, it still had to oblige to whatever standard education guidelines existed for that area. The documentary, although enlightening, was tragic and it really saddened me.