Race To Nowhere Summary

Race to Nowhere is a documentary about how students are pushed to the point of exhaustion by excessive schoolwork and incredible expectations. It challenges the school system as we know it by exposing all the adverse effects that have been created by it, and it shouts its message from the rooftops to any and all who will listen. Concerned parents, affected students, worried teachers, and more are the primary listeners, and they are all drawn in by the visuals, testimonials, and anecdotes of the movie. The visuals of this documentary most definitely reflect its intentions. The movie makes a successful attempt at replicating the feeling of overwhelmingness in students by offering few breaks between scenes or stories and making quick jump cuts that rapidly switch between interviews with little room to breathe. This provides the audience a sense of stress in order to better get them to relate to the students. The movie also offers several visuals of students in their own home doing work. This is meant to provide the audience a sense of disgust or disbelief. To think that the stress of school

The testimonials are what bear most of Race to Nowhere’s credibility, as the idea that people who work in colleges and have Ph.Ds support the film’s argument makes the audience put more of its trust in what is being said. They also provide even more credibility when citing quantitative data. Stating “50% of college students must be remediated” gives the audience even more reason to believe the argument because it has numbers. These numbers are also cold, hard facts that support the argument based on pure evidence. They cannot be disputed. Unfortunately, these numbers, and other informative facts or statistics, seldom show up, and when they do they are often overshadowed by the emotionally driven majority of the movie. This leads to a slight weakening of the film’s purpose, but not strong enough to discredit everything