The Language of Change

The documentary "Waiting for Superman" has opened up the airways for our nations to speak freely about American public education.  The film urges the public to look at the state of education today and question how it has become to unequal for the students.  While the film does spend much of the time criticizing the current state, the filmmakers do back their word and provide the audience with solutions to the problem.  their mission is four-fold.  With these changes, they believe America can drastically turn around education for the better.  The four solutions are: great teachers, prepared students, excellent schools and increased literacy.  The problem here lies in the fact that these generic words "great," "excellent" mean very little.  If someone were to look at the stases on which these improvements were defined, they would appear to be meaningless.  What qualifies a "great" teacher, or an "excellent" school?  These words were thrown around carelessly in the film and only added to the superior tone some critics felt this movie took.  In order to be more effective, I would have liked to have seen how Guggenheim (the director) qualified these value terms.

The 11th Hour (...and 59th Minute)

About two months ago our class went to see a screening of the documentary "The 11th Hour."  The film revolved around the central theme that we (our current global population) is now in the 11th hour in the crisis of global warming.  Although personally I support sustainability efforts, I could not help but think about how those who doubt global warming would have viewed this movie.  Similarly to when I saw "An Inconvenient Truth" I was captivated by the rhetoric and persuasiveness of the narrator, but was soon faced with a barrage of voices screaming about the film's propaganda and skewed statistics.  I did not understand how a movie that revolved around science could end up with such a polarizing effect.  When I went into "The 11th Hour" I had that thought in the back of my mind.  If I were to look at this movie from the point of view of a person who did not buy into this type of rhetoric, I most likely would have ignored the entire film.  Looking back on my notes I realize that most of the quotes I took down were reductions of dramatic sound-bites.  I think this use of over-simplification hurt the movie's chances of appealing to a broader audience.  The film really needed to carefully consider their audience construction in this piece to avoid what "An Inconvenient Truth" did- which was to separate public opinion about global warming even more than it already was.  These films are classics examples of "preaching to the choir."  Yes, people who act to prevent global warming will continue their belief after seeing this movie, but will anyone actually start to believe in it or act upon it because of this movie? I think of the people who believe global warming is a phenomenon made up by politicians and think of how the would react to this.  And I cannot help but feel that sound bite after sound bite would only make them role their eyes.