Don’t Take Education For Granted
This is how damn lucky I am: my biggest complaint with regards to my daughter’s elementary school is that the parents are so excited about their kids’ education that the overall vibe among the parents seems to be: “If you have time to breathe, you’re not doing enough.” They want every at-home parent to funnel all energy which had previously been focused on careers to now be directed at volunteering in the classrooms, chaperoning field trips, being an art or a music docent, raising money for the school, giving money to the school, or just generally spending every waking minute making our kids’ public elementary school experience more and better and amazing.
Poor me. I have the sheer dumb luck to end up renting a house in a neighborhood with a great public school. The landlord got a divorce and my husband and I ended up buying the house. No research was done regarding where to purchase real estate based on the schools in the area because we’d just gotten married and weren’t yet thinking in kid terms. Now we have a house, two kids, and an ass-kicking public school within walking distance. The school kicks ass because the teachers and the staff and all the hyper parents are obsessed with making it the be-all, end-all school.
The other parents are a little tough to take at times, but their hearts are in the right place so who cares? I’m more than willing to suck it up and be in a state of happy disbelief as to where I’ve landed. My kid is happy and hasn’t one iota of school-related tension or unhappiness.
So that’s my charmed life. And if I ever bitch and moan again about bake sales and field trip fees and having to adopt the classroom science unit goldfish (two of them) and snails (three) then please won’t someone remind me that I have it really, really good and a lot of people don’t. A good education and a happy day at school aren’t to be taken for granted.
Filmmaker Jill Freidberg has made two amazing documentaries about the teachers, students and parents fighting for, among other things, the teachers’ union and a decent education system in Mexico: Grain of Sand (Granito de Arena), and A Little Bit of So Much Truth (Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad).
I tend to avoid documentaries as a general rule (except Dog Town and Z Boys), but for Freidberg I’ve made an exception. Her films are neither preachy nor boring. But it’s not a happy documentary about daffodils, so in exchange for intelligently-filmed reality, you end up learning things that piss you off and break your heart. And there’s no place to wedge yourself to be safe from the story she’s telling you. You can’t chalk it all up to the contrived, Hollywood version of the story because she shoots in such a way that there’s no forced drama, nothing fake.
If you don’t trust the critique of a non-documentary-film-watcher, then trust all the artsy and brainy film festival acclaim and attention she’s received. The smart film folks like her just as much as I do.
Granito de Arena (Grain of Sand):
Completed in 2005, Granito de Arena provides context and background to the unprecedented popular uprising that exploded in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006. It serves as an excellent prequel to Corrugated Films’ latest release, Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad.
Award-winning Seattle filmmaker, Jill Freidberg (This is What Democracy Looks Like, 2000), spent two years in southern Mexico documenting the efforts of over 100,000 teachers, parents, and students fighting to defend the country’s public education system from the devastating impacts of economic globalization.
Freidberg combines footage of strikes and direct actions with 25 years worth of never-before-seen archival images to deliver a compelling and unsettling story of resistance, repression, commitment, and solidarity.
Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad (A Little Bit of So Much Truth):
In the summer of 2006, a broad-based, non-violent, popular uprising exploded in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Some compared it to the Paris Commune, while others called it the first Latin American revolution of the 21st century.
But it was the people’s use of the media that truly made history in Oaxaca.
A 90-minute documentary, A Little Bit of So Much Truth captures the unprecedented media phenomenon that emerged when tens of thousands of school teachers, housewives, indigenous communities, health workers, farmers and students took 14 radio stations and one TV station into their own hands, using them to organize, mobilize, and ultimately defend their grassroots struggle for social, cultural and economic justice.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
