Precious Knowledge Movie Review
As the documentary begins, it introduced Priscilla, Gilbert, Crystal and Mariah. They are four high school students who attend the Mexican American studies at Tucson High School in Arizona. In spite of how well the program is doing, there has been many disapproval of the program. The main person who really didn’t like the program and wanted it completely removed is Mr. Tom Horne. His main reason of disapproval of the program was that he believed that the class was influencing the students for a Mexican revolution against the American government. He then suggest a bill that would end the Mexican American studies program at Tucson Unified School District. With this all happening the teachers reminded their students not to react negatively to these events rather handle it in a lawfully way because their opponents just want the satisfaction of something terrible to happen to support their arguments. Instead of violence or immature reactions the teachers and students organized rallies to help get the community to understand what they are doing. Regardless of all the hard work the teachers and students did to help the community understand the truth, the bill was signed into law by Jan Brewer.
The movie ends with the teachers having their last class with their students before graduation and shows one of the students from the program who graduated attending the University of Arizona. In this documentary there were things that I found to be such great features. First the characters were just so real, their emotions were so genuine and you could feel the pain they felt when they lost their precious class. The filmmaker really knew how to catch those moments well. I’ve watched many documentaries and at times I feel that its so staged and rehearsed. Another thing I found to be a great feature was how long the documentary was. It was about 70 mins. During that time I learned so much about the situation then I knew 70 mins before. It was short and sweet and I even wished it was a little longer.
There were two things about the documentary that I found to be was the worse features. First one was that the ending, it wasn’t what I expected. I thought that the program would stay and that Tom Horne would change his opinion of the program. Instead the program was removed from the school district and a bill was signed into law ending all ethnic studies in the district. The second thing that I didn’t really like was that it was clear that it wasn’t only Mexican American students in the class, there were also other ethnicities in the class. It would have been great to focus on them as well because I would have loved to see how the class affects them in school and on a personal level especially since its not about their ancestors.
