IRFA email bulletin features a movie review of the the documentary "Waiting for Superman," guest reviewd here also by Cheryl Buford:
Do School Kids Need to Wait for "Superman"?
Director Davis Guggenheim of the much-praised new movie, "Waiting for Superman," seems to have sparked a renewed national conversation on the tragically underperforming urban public education systems--those "dropout factories," as some refer to the worst inner-city public schools. Guggenheim, who also directed the award-winning Al Gore documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," has expressed hope that his movie will create the political commitment to reform public education. It masterfully weaves together broad statistics on systemic education problems with the stories of five children and families desperately seeking a way out: a coveted slot in a high-performing, publicly funded charter school.
The movie has a big shortcoming: it fails to fully explore the important alternative that faith-based schools provide for many low-income families. For example, since 1970, the minority enrollment in Catholic schools has increased 250 percent. These schools graduate nearly all of their students, in sharp contrast to traditional public schools with a rate of around half that. The charter schools praised in the movie--as they should be--account for only about 3 percent of K-12 students. On the other hand, faith-based schools educate four times as many: roughly 12 percent of the students.
Yet rather than bend every effort to uphold and expand those successful faith-based schools, our nation is allowing private schools in general to be weakened by the economic crisis, and inner-city Catholic schools to dwindle as urban demographic trends make them less sustainable by the Catholic church. US governments give little support to faith-based schools, despite the important role they play. Especially now, as we are reminded of how scarce good inner-city public schools are, maybe it is time to think again about how the nation can best support schools of every good kind--including faith-based schools.
Just as in the first movie, Guggenheim publicizes just one side of the story which made the science look settled (actually science never gives more the probabilities, and the idea of a case being "closed" is not scientific; science and law here are qu+t different, which m+t be expected given the difference in the societal spheres involved. Again, Guggenheim proves himself to be less than candid about the situation for minority children who are being processed by public schools to render them unemployable and uneducated to pursue personal growth. Guggenheim as the guest review points out is a secularist and statist in the way he selects his subject matter. In this he follows the USA President currently in office. Prez Obama is a statist, and is a gradualist revolutionary (George Bernard Shaw) in the 20th century tradition of Christian Marxism (Liberation Theology) in its Black particularist variety (James Cone, as mediated thru Obama's former pastor, Rev Dr Jeremiah Wright, Trinity UCC, Chicago), with an community-organizing action theory based on Saul Alinsky.
Recently, one Reformed church history professor, Carl Trueman (Westsminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia), claims otherwise, because he thinks the case of Obama is not comparable to the Bolshevik Leninist, Trotskyist, and Maoist Marxism/s of a post-Marx era. Obama's Marxism is more comparable with Marx himself not with the Bolsheviks and Social Democrats who came later and were committed to direct violent revolution (Social Democrats also included non-revolutionaries in some countries, and revolutionaries who did not want to join the Communist Parties). In contrast, Obama's Marxism draws on the Marx before Lenin (as do a number of Liberation Theologians -- not all -- and more particularly he draws on the ideas of Dr James Cone who puts an American Black differential in place in the theory, following CLR James who broke with the Communist Party on this issue. Cone seems to incorporate strategically some of the ideas of George Bernard Shaw who was lead figure in the launching of the Fabian Society (Fabianism) which found the transformation of British society strategically more l+kly if it's gradual and not overly violent (except perhaps in some strikes in certain industries, a matter of tactics not strategy).
Trueman is evidently not equipped to use a Vollenhoven-derived problem-historical method to gauge what is and is not the historiographical case regarding Obama's ideas (the formation of which has been researched in a great new resource book by Dinesh D'Souza,
The Roots of Obama's Rage which uses emotion-related benchmarks to posit that the President's outlook is fed by another branch of analysis of ideas and experience, anticolonialism, with an ideational history of its own beyond all Marxisms). In any case, Trueman makes the false move to compare victims of Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism etc with the other forms of Marxism that existed before and after these other ruthless tyrannies tore lives apart in their mass programs, nevertheless using state power and driven by statist ideas.
We need to get past obstructionists kowtowing to Obama who kowtows to Saudi monarchs but sniffs his nose at Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, in one of whose dominions I live. May God bless her.
Back to Guggenheim's slant: Guggenheim, the director of the mistitled and exploitively titled Superman docuflick, has a political agenda ostensibly for charter schools, favoured by Obama as an answer to the failure of public schools regarding especially Black children. That aspect of Guggenheim's and Obama's education stance, I rejoice in. Nevertheless, the mode of presentation is propaganda; it's a propaganda flick for increasing the number of charter schools run by the state, a flick that erases the much more important job pursued by state-independent schools proceed under the magisterium of the Catholic Church in America, and other schools like the Protestant Christian parent-run schools thru-out the country, and Jewish and Muslim schools, too (altho these latter are often financed and curriculum-determined by Wahhabist Islamic wretchedness proffered by the Saudi Arabian government, again statist).
These nonstate schools shoud be supported by taxation and Fed support, if the state's won't or can't rise to meet the educational needs of Black children. Guggenheim's flick is in that respect very bad news, a falsification of history and the present situation. His documentaries are deeply dishonest.
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interview with Russ Weakley
