Mr. Holland's Opus & Music of the Heart

The two films Mr. Holland's Opus and Music of the Heart have certain similarities as well as considerable differences, but at heart, each celebrates the power of music in education and the need to support the arts in the educational setting for the benefit of all students. Inherent in this idea is the view that music is valuable in itself, but at the same time, it is seen as a force that empowers the student who studies it and plays it, a force for developing self-esteem and a sense of accomplishment. The study of music and the other arts is often depicted as if it were a frill, but the teachers who are the main characters in each of these films shows that it is not a frill at all but a central educational tool that helps students with other subjects and makes them better students all round.

The films take place in different worlds both in time and place--Mr. Holland's Opus offers a long-term look at a composer-turned-teacher and his many successes over the years, while Music of the Heart depicts a real teacher who brought music classes to a school in an urban area. Both films show how difficult it is to get young people interested in learning, though the reasons seem different in the two films. Mr. Holland's Opus is set in a suburban region, and Mr. Holland merely has to overcome the natural resistance of the young to learning. Music of the Heart, on the other hand, shows young people in an urban and minority area, and these young people face many forces keeping them

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signing the school of tomorrow. Among the issues are what curriculum and classroom practice must be, based on the premise "that schools and classrooms should be laboratories for a more just society than the one we live in now" ("Creating Classrooms for Equity and Justice" 4). According to this report, the schools of today are grounds for boredom, alienation, and pessimism, and too many schools fail to confront the racial, class, and gender inequities that are part of our social fabric. The editors of the report make the a number of recommendations, stating that the curriculum and classroom practice must be: 1) grounded in the lives of our students, meaning that teaching begins with a respect for children and for their ability to learn, and so the curriculum should be rooted in the experience of these children so they can relate the subject to their lives and thus be better able to understand; 2) critical, meaning that the curriculum should equip students to talk back and ask essential critical questions; 3) multicultural, anti-racist, pro-justice, meaning quite the opposite of what education is today, a place where these detrimental consequences are carried from society into the schools and back again; 4) participatory and exp

Category: Film - M