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Popular Culture Review
siblings while their mothers work to help support the family. Because of their
poverty, a number of students are more concerned about making whatever
money they can now instead of working toward an imaginary, larger paycheck
in a difficult-to-visualize future. And it doesn’t matter much how they earn it.
One student struggles to resist the lure of a good-paying job now as an auto
mechanic for the vagaries of what he could earn with a college degree years
later. Another fences stolen goods on the street, and another, at age 12 or so, is
already a bookie.
Perhaps the worst problem many of these cinematic students face is the
violence that pervades their lives outside the classroom. Violence lurks just
below the surface of the lives of the students in Dangerous Minds, and Luanne
Johnson, the hero of this film, eventually loses one student to street violence.
“You could get blasted anytime you walk out your door,” one student in Erin
Gruwell’s class says. Another tells her that he’s lucky to have made it to 18.
“We’re in war,” he says. “We graduating every day we live because we ain’t
afraid to die protecting our own.” The racial divisions and gang violence in the
community flow into her classroom. When Gruwell asks her students how many
have been shot at, all but the class’s one white student raise their hand. More
than half the students have lost three friends to gang violence.
Also a significant obstacle to teaching in challenging environments is the
influence of value systems inimical to mainstream—or as Robert C. Bulman
argues, “middle-class”—ideas about education.1 The mother of one of Jaime
Escalante’s students is not sure it’s a good idea that her daughter study calculus:
“Boys don’t like you if you’re too smart,” she warns. The father of another
Escalante student insists that his daughter, who wants to be a physician, doesn’t
need higher education because she will work in the family restaurant after
graduation. When two African-American brothers stop attending Johnson’s
class, she visits their home to find a grandmother who sees no value in “poetry
and shit.” When Johnson asks, don’t you want them to graduate from high
school? the grandmother replies that education is not in their future. “They’ve
got more important things to worry about,” she huffs, adding, “I ain’t raising no
doctors and lawyers here. They got bills to pay.”
Gruwell’s students adhere to codes of conduct that fuel and sustain gang
violence. One of her students, whose father was wrongly convicted of shooting a
black man, witnessed a shooting in a convenience store and identified a black
student as the shooter, even though the gunman was a friend of hers. Her code of
conduct required that she “protect our own,” even if it meant letting a killer go
free.
As discouraging to teachers as these real-life obstacles may be, the movies
suggest that the worst problem is the attitudes students have toward education,
which range from indifference to outright hostility. These students have no
respect for teachers, the system, or education. Until he puts his foot down and
demands to be addressed as “sir,” Clark’s students refer to him as “fool,” “dog,”