Time for School: 2003–2016

Gr 8 Up—More than 100 million children worldwide lacked access to education in 2000, according to this documentary. The United Nations launched an initiative that year to assure that every child could attend school. Three years later, a team of field producers began following five children living in poverty-ridden countries around the world. They hoped to track the kids' progress from their first day of school to their graduation from high school. In a village in India, Neeraj, age nine, began attending night school despite her father's preference that she remain illiterate. Eight-year-old Jefferson lived in a favela in Brazil, where his daily walk to school involved dodging bullets exchanged between drug dealers and police. Shugufa attended a religious school for girls in Afghanistan, risking daily attacks by the Taliban. Joab was 10 before he could attend school near his village in Kenya. For Nanavi, attending school in Benin in West Africa meant escaping confinement in a voodoo convent. The team checked in with the youth every three years. By 2015, responsibilities at home and, in two cases, negative peer pressure had contributed to only one of the five managing to graduate. Watching this film will give American youth an appreciation for the overwhelming obstacles faced by students in other countries and why getting an education is worth the daily struggle. The film falls short, however, in not pointing out that a major obstacle for the remote village children is their lack of early exposure to print.