Schools Film

"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."

-Socrates

As far as arguments go, the old generational decline one usually beginning with some vague temporal description such as “Kids these days” has provided each new “older” generation a way to reiterate their perception of their age demographic being better than the next. Each new generation does bring about a new set of problems, but this usually isn’t an issue of youth, but rather the world that surrounds them. And if they’re locked away in schools as depicted in the film, how can they manipulate their world around them for their own benefit, let alone for the world? Consistently throughout the film, the motif of schools representing prisons to the millions of American children who inhabit their hallways provided an interesting perspective into our public education system.

Having gone to school both in the Midwest and in the South, attending public schools for the duration, I have seen both ends of the spectrum in terms of the prison-like atmosphere of schools described in the film. Up until 8th grade, I attended a largely homogenous school district with little to no problems in terms of drugs, violence or other items discussed in the films, but that all changed when I moved to Florida for high school.

Within my four years at a public school in suburban Orlando, I saw school shooting threats, a riot that made national news, four bomb threats, two fights involving knives, and a couple instances win which a gun was brought to school. This was on top of usually weekly fights. Our school was staffed with several resource officers, and although the film painted them in a relatively bad light. It was reiterated in the film that resource officers and other measures to curb school violence have not been empirically backed by favorable statistics or studies, though I can anecdotally recall a few instances from my high school career where they were successfully utilized. Ranging from several bomb threats, school shooting threats, and to minor scuffles

In conclusion, more money needs to be allocated to education in our country, as we still lag behind most other industrialized nations academically (not to mention India and China). Rather than just attempting to curb the issues of kids not behaving in school with pills, resource officers and the like, attention needs to be drawn to the source problems. Administrators and teachers often fail to take into account home life, genetic predispositions, and other variables rather promoting homogeneity over individuality. While this maintains order within schools, students should want to get an education on their own accord rather than be forced into it.