Waiting for Superman

Waiting for Superman

Every American citizen is entitled to justice, liberty and a basic free public education?  Yes, the United States of America does have a system of free public education for children, but how good that education is varies. Watching the film “Waiting for Superman” brought bulging tears to my eyes. The film left me wanting to push myself and children harder in our quest for education.  Jeffery Canada, Waiting for Superman, perfected the ideology of a child when he shared that as a boy he was deeply saddened to learn that Superman was fictional. Jeffery stated that his sadness was in realizing that “no one was coming to save him” from his poverty stricken life. Most children think that the essence of life is only what they see and believe to experience (Canada). Joel Osteen once said that a famous rapper was asked why his lyrics were so negative and violent. The rapper answered “I’m just keeping it real, that’s what’s going on in the world we live in”.  Joel later stated that “if that young man would have traveled only three to four blocks outside of his neighborhood, he would have seen the many nice family friendly filled subdivisions of people who were living a totally different lifestyle.” Like the young rapper, many American children are raised in ill-fated, undesirable, and underprivileged conditions. Jeffery Canada, Superintendent of Schools in Harlem New York, as a child, visualized education as a way out of a birthright of poverty.  Jeffery Canada, like many other educators in recent decades studied the failures of his local school system, the impact it made on others, and then created a program to better educate those who were most affected by the lack of education . Listening to the different however similar stories and situations of the people in the movie, Waiting for Superman, awakened me to the realization that many times people can’t change how they start in life but they can make conscious decisions and efforts about how they will continue in life, thus affecting their future.  I really appreciate my ENC 1102 teacher for choosing this film to share with the class. It, like many of the others we have watched, was very enlightening and inspiring.