Across the Pond

"A foul disease called social prejudice." Mud wagon used in Stagecoach. In 1939 director John Ford squeezed seven people into a stagecoach and gave them a rough ride across the desert. The group encountered Apaches; had to deal with the premature labor of a traveling woman; needed to figure out how to cross the river after Lee's Ferry had been burned down. Sounds hard enough. But what makes matters really bad - and the movie a classic - are the group of seven, their personalities and biographies, and "a foul disease called social prejudice" (words of Josiah Boone, an alcoholic doctor). The seven are: a prostitute, a dishonest banker, a pregnant cavalry officer's wife, a Confederate gambler, a whiskey salesman, the doctor, and a fugitive outlaw. Tensions between these characters run high from the beginning but as life goes - or is it just Hollywood? - they are softened towards the end. Stagecoach* is one of my favorite movies. On a recent trip to...

The school debate goes on. This week another documentary reached movie theaters in the US: Waiting for Superman . It is directed by Davis Guggenheim who was also in the chair for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The new movie focuses on the drop out problem in the United States. It talks about kids in Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC who want to learn but don't get a chance because their neighborhood school is lousy; about parents who struggle for their kids and teachers who don't; about public school administrators who want to turn things around but run up against the walls of the unions; about a handful of charter schools and teachers which make a difference because they care. In the end we are reminded that there will be no Superman to fix the problem (president after president promised to do so) but that we can act. We can volunteer for our local school, mentor a child, donate, let our voice be heard at school board meetings and i...

Something is rotten in our education systems - on either side of the pond. 87 percent of all young people in the US want to go on to college after high school and yet one in three drop out of school. Reasons include the need to earn money, early pregnancy, having to care for a relative, and in some cases academic challenges that seem insurmountable; 69 percent of drop outs state that they are "not motivated or inspired to work hard". Drop out rates are highest among blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, where one in two children do not finish high school. (Data from this PBS Newshour report and from  The Silent Epidemic - Perspectives of High School Dropouts, a report prepared for the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in 2006.) At the other end of the spectrum are those who are pushed to give their all, usually white or Asian kids. A recent documentary about this group of students, Race to Nowhere, talks about the pressure these children face a...