Christian Ethics and the Movies
Reviewed by David A. Thomas, Assoc. Prof. of Rhetoric Emeritus University of Richmond
Freedom Writers (2006)
Freedom Writers is a teacher flick based on a true story that took place in 1994. Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank portrays 23-year old Erin Gruwell, an idealistic English teacher in a Long Beach, California high school characterized by a highly diverse student population. At the time of the story, due to recent redistricting, Wilson High is populated by large segments of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and other ethnic groups, with not a few gang members among them. She finds herself isolated by her faculty colleagues, made up of a rigid group of older white and elitist teachers. Unlike them, Erin sees the opportunity to work with poor and troubled children from mixed backgrounds as a stimulating and exciting challenge. In her first teaching assignment, she is given 150 freshmen enrolled in the "dummy" English classes.
Her department chair tells her that her inner-city students are so bad that they cannot be issued any of the textbooks gathering dust in the storeroom because they can`t read them. Besides, they will just lose or damage them. Instead, Erin must use simplistic below grade-level workbooks and a comic book version of Romeo and Juliet. If the teacher wants her special students to have better books or other materials, then she has to purchase them herself out of pocket on her beginning teacher`s pay.
Because her children are bused to the school from distant housing projects and spend up to three hours in transit, they are not expected to do homework. Erin`s senior English teaching colleague, Mr. White Bread himself, assures her that her main job is baby sitting, since most of her pupils won`t stay in school long enough to reach his junior honors English classes anyway. For example, in one scene, when one of her minority students does manage to test into his class, he promptly calls on her to give "the black perspective" on a story they were studying. The mortified girl asked to be transferred back into Erin`s "dummy" class where she felt more at home among the other Black, Cambodian, and Latino kids.
Freedom Writers is the story of how one teacher made a difference in her students` lives despite the manifold ways the system stacked the deck against her. She threw herself into her job so wholeheartedly and passionately that her marriage suffered. Lacking the proper literary teaching resources and materials she needed, she shifted her lesson plans towards focusing on her student`s own lives. As an assignment, she distributed blank journals and pencils, and asked them to write brief essays about their experiences to share with one another. As you might imagine, she was not prepared to read about the daily violence and insults these children witnessed, and endured, both at home and in their neighborhoods. Erin`s first task, therefore, was to provide a zone of safety and nurturance for all of the members of her class. The starting point was to find ways to help them overcome their distrust of her, and even more basically, of each other.
The device of having the children write personal journal entries led to her next step, which was to introduce them to another group of children who had also been victimized by their society-children of the Holocaust. To her amazement, none of her students had ever heard of it. She took her class on a field trip (at her own expense) to the local Holocaust Museum. Then she had them read The Diary of Anne Frank, copies of which, again, she bought for them herself. When the students began to see the significance of the Holocaust to their own situations, her next step was to invite elderly Jewish survivors to speak to her class. By this time, she had succeeded in unifying her class to the extent that they organized and promoted an all-school fundraiser to fly to America the Dutch woman who provided shelter for the Frank family in her home during WWII.
As part of the fundraiser, Erin had her class assignment essays bound into a book that subsequently became a bestseller, entitled The Freedom Writers Diary. The movie ends with the close of that school year. Outside the boundaries of the movie, since then, Erin Gruwell has moved on from Wilson High and is now a college professor.
Ethical Implications. As a teacher myself, I find "teacher flicks" and "coach flicks" to be a highly stimulating and relevant genre of movies. Think of Hoosiers. There have been a large number of them. Most are low budget films, and few of them achieve blockbuster status. Not everyone wants to see movies like this. Coach flicks usually do better than teacher flicks, given that ticket-purchasing teenage boys are more attracted to the gym and playing field than to the classroom! The central themes of these movies are the value of education and the powerful influence a single dedicated teacher can make in the lives of students.
Freedom Writers has special appeal to readers of this journal because its scene is multiculturalism. Wilson High is a microcosm of the metropolis, indeed, of the larger global culture we all are learning to live in. Using the Holocaust as a primary object lesson for teaching tolerance and grace in the midst of hatred and oppression is about as moral and ethical as it gets.
