Radical
“Radical,” a Mexican film in Spanish, is based on the true story of an extraordinary teacher in a marginalized community. Chucho (Daniel Haddad) manages an elementary school in a very impoverished area filled with crooked politicians and plagued by violence from drug mafia. Sergio (Eugenio Derbez) is the newly recruited teacher whom the school has hired at the very last minute because one of the teachers had quit only a day before school began. One of the sister teachers puts it rather disdainfully that the only qualification of the teachers is to be alive.
Chucho has little faith left in attempting to make any worthwhile inputs on the education of the children because on their way to school, the pupils had to walk across yellow crime scene tape and over dead bodies, the encyclopedias in the library are three decades old and the computers in the computer lab have not worked for four years. Although most students are expected to leave school after grade six to assist with family chores or take part in gangs. The school, which is composed of the detached pupils, lectures, rote learning, and assignments.
They will often refer to the school in a mocking fashion that it is `a house of torture.“ Chucho however would yell ‘whenever the students are neatly arranged in their uniforms on the first day of school,’ “A silent man is a man who obeys and compliance is the principal element of discipline and discipline is the essence of teaching.” There is no desire to go against the traditional ways or the conventional sources of power. When the computer lab’s budget miraculously runs out and teachers get the answers for standardized exams in advance to secure some bonuses for students’ rote learning, he just tells Sergio that, “Nobody cares about what goes on here…don’t stir the hornet’s nest.”
As the Wired Magazine article of 2013 titled, A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses, the work of Sergio Juarez Correa at the José Urbina López Primary school in Matamoros Mexico was the focus. On the top cover, one of the students was there with a caption stating, “The Next Steve Jobs?” Compelled by the work of Sugata Mitra, an educational technology specialist, that encouraged students to learn, ‘the self-study student is liberating technology transformed in the New Age version of Neill’s ideas that were popular in the 1960s.’
“What would you like to learn?” this is a question that is asked of Sergio (for that is how he prefers to be addressed by students). He urges them to set aside and indeed, even to overlook fertility the grades they are pursuing. “Who wants to be wrong first?”
When students get to his class for the first time, they stop at the door since the desks have been inverted and stacked in groups. He informs them that they are 30 meters under the water, the desks are the boats and if the students do not go aboard they will die. However, if there are too many people in the boat, it capsizes. But how do we decide how many people should be in each boat in order to rescue the largest number from the water? This is the sort of thing that makes the students desire knowledge on flotation constituting math and physics. One student even goes on to ask how we come to the conclusion on who to extend the rescue to when the people in the boat are already full. Sergio tells her that she is a philosopher just like John Stuart Mill. A student who introduces herself as Paloma (Jennifer Trejo) gains an interest in math and astronomy. Sergio tells her that she could become an aerospace engineer. In a short while, Sergio is having the students outside in the playground each becoming a planet that is revolving and rotating around its axis.
Derbez, also known for his charismatic presence onscreen, is most effective in his interactions with the youth, as when he played a music instructor in the movie “Coda” and the eccentric doctor in “Miracles from Heaven.” The young actors are very animated, switching seamlessly from one character to another, such as, Jennifer Trejo as Paloma, a talented young mathematician residing next to the trash dump with her father and scavenging it for a living and Swope, Mia Fernanda Solis, who checks out philosophy books from the college library but later has to quit school to look after her infant brother, and Danilo Guardiola as Nico, who at first is drawn into drug smuggling by his brother and who now started wishing for education instead and being with Paloma more.
Sergio hopes to reform the policies in regards to the school but those are minor compared to how he hopes to reform the sixth graders. To memorizing a number of details, he is more concerned with making them want to learn, teaching them how to learn and showing them the potential and the desire for knowledge they possess. Chucho is also amongst those who enjoys this.
Among some of the most powerful aspects of the film is the moment showcase in the movie where the two gentlemen establish a certain kind of contact and then proceed to sit down to talk in low tones. As the teachers they licked up to in the past are given, this is the time that Chucho comes back to thinking about what it was that made him go into the teaching profession. Lucky for us, hopefully we have such a teacher at some point in our lives that lets us know who we are and what we can do. And if not, it is safe to add that the character of Sergio will later on service that lost sense of time.
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