School Ties

The film "School Ties" is an effective education tool. It can be used to teach students about many different social issues such as bullying or racism. This film could be used to teach students about racism because of the feelings and comments about the Jewish. The main character, David Greene, is a Jewish boy who starts to attend a school made of mostly christian students and staff. On his first day the football coach told Greene not to advertise that he is Jewish at the school. Throughout the entire movie David feels he has to hide his religion from all of his friends because they hate the Jewish. All of his friends throughout the entire movie made jokes abouts the Jewish or racist comments because that was how they were taught by their parents to treat them. The racism in this movie can be used to show students now how people were treated a few years ago and how it hurts that person because once it came out that David was Jewish everyone started to treat him differently and nobody wanted to be around him. The only limitation that showing this movie presents is that even though David is not expelled for cheating everyone still hates him and the movie does not show a large group of people start to learn how to respect others. It is important to teach students about respect to people of other religions so that this kind of racism eventually disappears.

Almost everything that is shown in school has some complaint afterwards. If I was a teacher showing this movie to my class and a parent complained I would probably still show the movie. If a parent complained I would explain to them why I am showing the class this movie and what educational value the movie has. I would tell this parent that the movie "School Ties" teaches students about racism. bullying and respect. I think that after a parent learned why the movie was being shown than they might not have the same complaint.

I think that using a movie to get the messages in this movie has some limitations. Using a movie to portrays serious message sometimes does not work because not everyone will listen to the movie if it all about a serious topic. Another problem with using a movie is that some people might not pick up on the messages in the story. There are also some benefits to using a movie. One of the benefits to using a movie is that most people would prefer to watch a movie than watch a commercial or listen to the radio. I think that a media form that would be better suited for this kind of message would be a newspaper article because it allows the reader to get first hand accounts from people who have had problems with racism or bullying. Another media form that would be better than a movie is a public service announcement because sometimes movies are too long and the message gets lost because some people do not have long attention spans and PSA's are short and usually easy to understand.