TV Drama: Walkout
There was a time in
California when Spanish students were paddled if they spoke any language other
than at English at school. Their bathrooms were locked during lunch, they were
forced to do janitorial work as a punishment, and many in the high school
administrations actively dissuade the less promising students from attending
college.
The HBO movie Walkout is based on a true story from East Los Angeles about how
students protested this discrimination.
In this clip Bobby
and Jesus speak Spanish in class and are called to the front for a spanking.
Picture and video credits: HBO.
Traditionalschooldiscipline@gmail.com
I wonder who was responsible for the two missing apostrophes in the message below the hanging paddle. Nice bit of hypocrisy.
ReplyDeleteIt's good that movies like this highlight injustices that happened in the past. It's also good when they inspire protests against injustices that still happen. It's sad that so many injustices are seen as historical things that happened a long time ago and people get the idea that they don't happen any more.
ReplyDeleteAll over the internet there are accounts of ethnic groups in schools *still* getting exactly this sort of treatment in some situations. Bathrooms locked during lunch, forced to do janitorial work as punishment, discouraged from attempting more challenging subjects or courses. And of course, back to the topic of this blog, some ethnic groups in the USA are hugely disproportionately more likely to receive school spankings than other ethnic groups.
In the UK school spankings aren't legal any more. But there are still hundreds of schools in the UK where kids are routinely and regularly punished if they're heard speaking a language that's "not approved of". In this case the language is English because Welsh medium schools are promoted as a way of strengthening the Welsh language. That's an injustice just as much as it was an injustice when some kids were punished for speaking Welsh in class. Which is ironic because the exaggerated popular accounts of historical "Welsh not" punishments (they didn't really happen as often as described, and they weren't ordered by the Westminster government) are now used to justify punishing kids for being caught speaking English.