School Ties

I had never heard of this movie until my friend bought Freedom Writers. It came with it and was full of big names - Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck - so why had we never heard of it before? Well, it was made in 1992 before any of them were big. Anyway, I sat down to watch it and was reminded, very strongly, of Dead Poets Society. In School Ties, which is set in the 1950s, a senior from Pennsylvania, David, goes off to St. Matthew's, a private school, to play football. One catch - he's Jewish. So he hides that he's Jewish because none of the guys like Jews. Of course they find out, but I don't want to tell too much more of the plot and give it away.
One of the teacher's in this movie, Mr. Cleary, is horrible. He pushes one of the students so far that he loses it, cracks, and has to leave the school. The amount of pressure that is on these students is amazing. Most of them are fourth or fifth generation boys whose families have gone to Harvard or Princeton for years. They have to make it in or else they have failed. Putting that much pressure on students is not a good thing. One of the boys, Charlie Dillon, tells a story about a boy who hung himself because he didn't get into Harvard.
The Anti-Semitism in this movie is also very apparent. From the first night that David is there, Jew jokes are heard. You can tell that he is uncomfortable with them, but doesn't say anything because the view that his friends have of Jews is so very stereotypical. This is, of course, one of the main conflicts in the movie, because when David's friends find out he is Jewish they do some horrible things to him, including blaming cheating on a test on him. This is not so very different from schools today, and it is not only limited to private schools. In schools where there is little diversity and no teaching of that diversity, stereotypes flourish and are taken as truth. David's teachers did nothing to dispel the stereotypes, and the head of the school is even seen to have and believe stereotypes about the Jewish people. It should be schools' jobs to teach about diversity and other cultures and belief systems so that these hurtful stereotypes are less likely to take hold and be believed. Multicultural education should be a fundamental part of our curriculum so that the things that are portrayed in movies like this are not repeated in our classrooms and society.