Stanton School

I thought that the documentary on Stanton School was very interesting in many aspects. First of all, I noticed that unlike City Springs, the Principal was a white lady. I thought that image could play an important role in the surveillance that black students and their parents may have related to the Principal because of the labels that both races have in society. However, I changed my mind when I saw that there were teachers of both white and black race. The case of this study was interesting because it did not focus on the teaching method but rather on the way the institution dealt with the students’ behavior. I think that an important message that both the Principal and the self-esteem teacher talk about is how important it is for a student to feel loved and to build their own confidence in order to be able to learn at school. In that sense, this reminds me of Makiguchi’s ideas on education -the teacher as a facilitator for the students to help them realize their own potential and mission. Also, another thing that came to my mind when watching this documentary is the idea of discipline. Discipline can be a very important and good influential factor in education in cases like the Stanton School. If the students were to find things by themselves they were going to find all the bad things that surrounded them such as drugs, they find that bad influence even at their own homes. In this case, I thought that discipline was being applied not as something negative or a form of domination but as a path for the students to be better. Another aspect of the documentary that reminded me of something that we discussed in class several times is when the Principal and the teachers were discussing the bad results of the standardized tests. One of the teachers said: “We do our best when we teach but they can’t acquire what we are teaching them.” When I heard that I remembered Vigotsky the child doesn’t necessarily understand the same message that the mother is trying to give him. Overall, I think that this documentary was a great way of showing how different theories that we’ve been discussing in class are applied in real life school situations.