The Real Problem With Waiting for "Superman" [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

Waiting for "Superman", in case you haven't heard, is the hot new film from Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim..."Teaching should be easy," Guggenheim declares as we watch a cartoon teacher rip open his students' skulls and pour what looks like blue Spaghetti-O's inside...This is about as close as the film gets to depicting actual teaching...

Despite repeatedly insisting poor kids just need better teachers, the film never says what it is that better teachers actually do...."When you see a great teacher, you are seeing a work of art," Geoffrey Canada tells us, but this is something Guggenheim would rather tell than show.

The film has other flaws. It insists all of America's problems would be solved if only poor kids would memorize more: Pittsburgh is falling apart not because of deindustrialization, but because its schools are filled with bad teachers. American inequality isn't caused by decades of Reaganite tax cuts and deregulation, but because of too many failing schools. Our trade deficit isn't a result of structural economic factors but simply because Chinese kids get a better education.

Make no mistake, I desperately want every kid to go to a school they love, but it seems far-fetched to claim this would solve all our country's other problems. At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause...

http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2010/10/aaron-swartz-at-huffington-on-wfs-if.html

http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2010/10/aaron-swartz-at-huffington-on-wfs-if.html