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Popular Culture Review
education; not a restructuring of the school system; not strong pedagogical and
political leadership. What America’s ailing education system really needs is
more teachers like Ron Clark, Jaime Escalante, Luanne Johnson and Erin
Gruwell; teachers too focused on their students to worry about salaries, working
conditions, stifling bureaucracies, poor leadership, and the like. The subtext
seems to be that teachers who are concerned with these things and who refuse to
take sole responsibility for student failure are not real teachers. If teachers really
cared about their students, this rhetorical vision asserts, they would sacrifice as
much as the teachers in these movies do, and those teachers who are not willing
to do so are depicted as uncaring and unconcerned. Thus this rhetorical vision
defines what a “real” teacher is. (The movies raise no questions about the
psychological motivations of people who make students the center of their lives
regardless of the personal cost.) How many teachers with families, mortgages,
and bills can make the sacrifices these cinematic teacher-heroes make? How
many would want to?
It is also significant that the films put valid complaints about the current
state of education into the mouths of characters the audience doesn’t like, which
deftly discredits these criticisms by making them seem to be the products of
self-interested teachers and administrators. Mrs. Campbell is a good example.
One of the reasons she does not want Gruwell to give district books to the
students is that the books will disappear or, if they do get retur