School Ties Essay, Research Paper

Though the movie School Ties takes place decades before the

movie Higher Learning, there are many similarities. These movies

show us that students on any campus in any year have always

faced the same problems. These problems being racism, finding a

peer group and finding financial aid. These movies show how the

different groups keep their distinctiveness.

Racism doesn t have to occur between people with different

skin colours. It can be all the other religious denominations in a

school discriminating against a single Jewish student as was the

case in School Ties. Or it can be skinheads climbing up on a

belltower trying to kill as many black students as possible.

The movie school ties is about a star football player, who

happens to be Jewish going to a private high school in the 1950 s.

He comes from a working class family and his only way of fitting

in with the preppy, who while unknowingly, openly insult his

religion in front of him other students is to bond with the other

football players. That is his niche. In Higher Learning all of the

characters try to belong with other groups. The black runner who

is on a full scholarship after being threatened by skinheads hangs

around with all the other black students who are almost a Black

Panther s like group. When a small town kid from Iowa can t

belong with any group he starts hanging around with white

supremacists just to belong and eventually they corrupt him and he

starts believing their propaganda and takes it to the extreme by

climbing a bell tower and trying to kill as many non white students

as he can. Lastly in the movie Higher Learning their is a young

sexually inexperienced white female from a working class

background who experiments with bisexualism. All of these

students just join these groups even if they don t really feel the

way the others do, just to obtain a sense of unity with others like

them.

Both of these movies also show how difficult it is for

students to afford to attend these places of higher learning. In

School Ties the main character is only attending this prestigious

school to benefit their football team. The severity of this is shown

when he misses a sacred Jewish holiday to play a football game.

To the University he is only a Football player and if he isn t

winning football games for them he isn t worth paying for.

In school matters we encounter the same scenario. With the black

track star. When he starts slacking off and missing practices the

coach changes his full scholarship to a partial scholarship and he

doesn t have enough money to pay for his tuition. Once again in

show how Universities are just businesses looking to make money

like any other.

The last similarity in the movies is culture. More specifically

pop culture. In both movies much like in modern society, groups

of people who hang around together tend to dress similar and in

the same style and listen to the same music. In school ties all the

students could wear whatever appropriate dress clothing they wish

but the more trendier students always wore a school tie. In higher

learning the skinheads all had tattoos of swastikas and Nazi seals.

They wore dark clothing with wife beater undershirts, had the

same hair cut and listened to punk music. The black student s also

had their own style they dressed in, resembling the Fresh Prince of

Bel Air s style and listened to Rap Music. On the topic of Music

the love Fest music festival. Run by the bisexual curious female

student designed to unite the student body gathered all the

student s together making it easier for the sniper to pick targets.

If you notice the ways these students interact with each other

in each movie are similar, even when compared to the activities of

our student body it is almost eerie how so little has changed in the

last 50 years. We all do things maybe even things we don t agree

with to fell as though we belong. Some things we may regret later

in life. These to movies show that how even though time changes,

some things always stay the same.