Summary- Lives on the Boundary / Race to Nowhere
At the beginning of the book, Rose talks about Laura, the daughter of a food vendor in Tijuana and one of his students. She has a lot of difficulty in the remedial English class that Rose teaches; she is always afraid of taking risks and making mistakes. Rose compares this to the goddess Grammatica, an ugly figure with pincers and a scalpel to eat regular people alive; this is meant to show the difficulty of writing, both for Rose and his remedial students. Even at UCLA, these immigrant students face tough challenges trying to catch up to the American education levels that are demanded here.
Rose talks about himself and the other teachers who teach English A, the most remedial course in UCLA, and one that is looked down upon by the other teachers – he points out that some of them are smart and quite good at answering questions, but are nervous and shy about it. This shows the snootiness that takes place in such a rich place. Rose himself gets involved in the life and education of a student named Bobby, who shows an ability to memorize history, but not social history. He is also confused by things like linguistics and mathematics, things that never gave him trouble before.
Rose uses this to transition into a section about the growing ‘back to basics’ movement in education, since higher education and prestigious universities make remedial courses in order to make sure people have the fundamentals down. He uses statistics to take us through the education and literacy crisis, and finally ends on a note that working-class lives (like his) inspire intellectual curiosity, which these children sorely lack.
EVLAUTION: RACE TO NOWHERE
The documentary “Race to Nowhere” deals with a lot of the issues Rose talks about in his book, such as the difficulties of higher education and the pressures children get put under. The film’s argument is that schools and parents are “stealing [children’s] childhoods” by putting them through overly demanding school programs and forcing them to work as a child to prepare for college. The documentary has a fair but sometimes too emotional opinion of the hard work that children have to go through in school, emphasizing the drama of a lost childhood as the main call to action in the film.
“Race to Nowhere” starts with showing the individual difficulties of students as they try to keep up with parental and societal expectations of school performance – parents talk about how they want to give their child the opportunities they never had, and so on. However, students also talk about the effects this has on their self-esteem, and even points out cases in which students have killed themselves because of all the pressure. Academic leaders and concerned adults talk at length about the need to include critical thinking skills and the arts in a well rounded education, instead of just teaching the basic skills needed to get a good job.
The documentary itself is actually very informative and affecting, as it makes clear the issues the documentary is talking about. At the same time, there is often not enough real data that backs up these claims, and it plays on emotional appeals too much. Despite this, however, it does make a decent logical claim about the need for arts education in schools, something that they show has a history of being in danger of extinction in the educational system. The production values are a bit low, but its dedication to the points it is presenting makes it still effective despite that.
I responded quite well to the documentary, though I admit there were moments that tested my patience. Too often, I feel like the filmmakers are tugging at my heartstrings, working too hard to make me feel bad for the students and assuming problems that have not necessarily been proven. The documentary points toward a general trend of education rather than having a lot of data to back it up, so it leaves me asking whether we know for sure these changes in society are a) true and b) leading to these children’s frustration in school. I felt the documentary could have used more diverse tools to show its points more often, instead of just having concerned parent after concerned educator speak in doomsday terms about the future of education. In short, the documentary could have benefited from a two-sided perspective.
In conclusion, the documentary “Road to Nowhere” provides a fairly detailed look into the problems facing our education system today, even though it could use a more well-rounded look into the causes of these problems. The solutions are extremely sensible, but sometimes the speakers and interviewees sound overly fanatical about their points, which makes their tone hurt their argument. However, despite this, the students shown deeply care about their education, and the documentary successfully points to an overemphasis on academics over critical thinking and a complete childhood, saying that kids should be allowed to be kids at these important years in their lives.
