The Inspiring Documentary ‘On The Way To School’ Is A Call-To-Action For Educators And Parents Alike

We’ve all heard the one about how our grandparents walked to school two miles each way uphill in the snow while wearing newspapers as shoes, but what about the one where an eleven-year-old walked ten miles each way to school dodging elephants, giraffes, and (gasp) even lions?

Such is the way of life for Jackson, an eleven-year old Kenyan boy and his sister Salome in the 2015 documentary, On the Way to School, directed by Pascal Plisson. The film, which is available to stream on Netflix, follows four students on their morning commutes to school in Kenya, Morocco, Argentina, and India. In Morocco, three girls must walk along a dangerously steep countryside path, trading their chicken —a live animal, mind you, not a pattie from the bodega— for some pastries. Meanwhile, in Argentina, a boy and his sister ride on horseback through Patagonia, hoping not to fall and stopping along the way to pray at a make-shift altar.

It is the travels of young Samuel, however, that will pull at your heartstrings the hardest. The young Indian boy is bound to a makeshift wheelchair and struggling from a painful, crippling illness, but is pushed by his brothers along garbage-filled pathways on the way to school. Under such oppressive conditions, you’d assume their faces would register nothing but glumness, but you’d be wrong: Samuel and his brothers smile the whole way. Even when one of the wheelchair’s wheels bends in the dirt road, and even when he must be carried by workers in order to bypass a broken down van, they smile. He cannot WAIT to go to school and learn how to be a doctor so he can help other children like him. Samuel recognizes that not every child gets the chance at an education, and most certainly not all children with such afflictions, and his spirit is nothing short of inspirational.

This is not to say that getting to school cannot be challenging for American students, who often endure long bus-rides, traveling with empty bellies, or leaving the house independently while mom or dad sleeps after working all night. But what appears different for the four protagonists of On The Way To School are the children’s attitudes towards education.

As an educator in a Title I school, I was tempted to compare these stories to the time my own students called me “grimy” for forgetting to buy soda for our pizza party (the bill for which I footed on my dazzling teacher’s salary) or the time a student told me that “[my] paycheck [bought] her Nike’s,” or even the time a parent told me her child was learning to read in case his baseball career didn’t work out. In the United States, every child is not only entitled to an education, but required to receive one. Does that contribute to a sometimes apparent sense of educational entitlement?

The film leaves viewers with the feeling that in other places in the world (ie, not in America) there is an extreme reverence with which each child approaches their education. Each featured child is not only willing to attend school, but willing to travel a great distance under life-threatening conditions in order to not necessarily change their destinies —as in the case of Carlito, who wants to inherit his family’s land and take over his family’s business— but simply to learn. One of the most striking moments in the film is when Jackson arrives in his classroom and his teacher acknowledges each child’s journey simply by saying, “Thank you for coming to school today.” It is a call for all educators to recognize that even here (where the streets are paved with gold) there are daily challenges facing children, and those who come to school with a smile and who are ready to learn (even if they have forgotten their homework or their pencil) should be recognized and thanked.

[Watch On The Way To School on Netflix]

Maggie Arak is a schoolteacher and mother of 4-year-old twins. You can follow her on Twitter: @maggiearak.

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