I liked Michael Moore’s new documentary, Where To Invade Next. What stayed with me most were his ruminations on education, society, and shared responsibility. The film highlighted various inequities in the U.S. such as our failing public education system, unfair drug laws, harsh prison system, and broken healthcare system. He posed the question, Why don’t we take better care of our own?
I’ll focus on education. In the U.S., our education system is broken in many ways. Moore travels to Finland, France, and Germany to glean important insights regarding education. In Finland, Moore learns about educating the whole child. Finnish schools assign little, if any, homework and have few, if any, standardized tests. Students are encouraged to play and socialize, think critically, be creative, and become independent. There is also equity in Finland, which means that most schools are of high quality, so children can attend their zoned schools instead of parents having to shop around. In France, school lunch programs are taken seriously. They boast a level of culinary excellence that does not exist in the U.S. They also have an instructional component, and students are taught how to maintain a balanced and healthy diet. In Germany, schools are exploring ways of teaching about the Holocaust. Their emphasis is on owning their country’s history (good and bad), recognizing where moral failures occurred, making amends for those failures, and improving their society as a result. We should be striving for these things in the U.S. American children would benefit from receiving a more well-rounded education, and learning how to live a healthier lifestyle. There should be a greater emphasis on recognizing our country’s moral failures, discussing them openly in a constructive manner, and grappling with how to learn from those experiences in order to improve as a society. I think there should be a greater push for this in our schools.
An Icelandic woman in the film remarked that, in the U.S., there is no shared responsibility and we don’t care about our neighbors. That our focus is more on “me” and less so on “we.” I reflected on that for a while. While I don’t fully agree with her, I do think we could do a better job of taking care of our own. Our country would be stronger for it. And taking care of our children by providing every child with a quality public school education would be a great place to start.