"Modern times"

In this movie we could see one of the biggest issues of the history. These issues were inside the work’s environment. Obviously this affected directly the quality of life of the people at that time. The main character in this movie was “Charles Chaplin.” He represented in a very good way the main conflicts related with the absence of worker’s rights.
It was incredible the analogy between sheep and people at the beginning of the movie. This analogy means that there weren’t differences among animals and workers. Everything must be production in order to be more useful inside a job. It didn’t matter the health and mental conditions of the worker class. Also, the movie showed that workers didn’t have private moments to relax themselves. This was reflected in a funny way, when Chaplin wanted to smoke a cigarette, in the bathroom, he couldn’t because his boss was in everywhere spying him.
Workers were forced to work like machines. This was because bosses wanted more efficient workers and waste less time of productivity inside their companies. This was very stressful. Moreover, Chaplin wanted to be in prison because in there he was more secure and relax. He prefered to be in jail than lost his freedom working.
On the other hand, he met a girl who was affected by the same stressful reality but indirectly. Her father was unemployed. So they share the same feeling of being insecure in life. In one scene they saw a happy couple. This couple lived in a beautiful house. Chaplin and his friend imagine that they were that couple, living in a beautiful house, without problems. So, this means that they really wanted to overcome that sad present. Anyway, they could find a job and they had a house but the crude reality forced to them to lose everything again. Thanks to the police. They were looking for the girl because she escaped from them.
On the whole, this movie show us how crude was the worker’s life without rights can be. Thanks good nowadays it is different, isn’t?

We could make the choice, as the workers did to ask for their rights.

• -By the way of introduction it is good to know that, nowadays workers have more rights than in the last centuries. For example if we contrast the Victorian age with our actual society we can find many differences in terms of workers rights.

• Through the time workers realised that something was wrong with the way that they were treated. For this reason, the following essay will explain which the main revolutions were in order to give to the worker class a better quality of life inside their jobs. Also it is very connected with our educational reality. Thanks to these revolutions many schools are following the predominant society and their need. How this will affect our reality? Moreover how this will affect our own quality of life inside our future jobs?

• First, we should see since when workers begin to express their dissatisfied with the way they were treated. We can remember the Victorian Era, Queen’s Victoria’s rule from June 1837 to January 1901 in the United Kingdom. At this period the relationship between modernity and cultural issues were pretty close. Workers had to face the injustice among social classes. This was good in one way because they began to think about their rights. Also, the impetus of the industrial revolution made worst this situation. However, the industrial revolution marked a major turning point in human society.

• Secondly, after check since when the worker class begin to be aware about their rights we are going to change our route in order to know some important revolutions, in terms of though present in the modern period. There are four ones that helped to think about the modern concept of the work. The first is a scientific one. Francis Bacon an Irish philosopher was the precursor of this revolution. He thought that “know is power”. The second one is a political conception about the modern time. In this period people start to think on an ideal democracy, in order to change the political way of think about the work class.

• The third one is a change in the cultural conception. Here people began to demand among themselves the use of the autonomy and the reason inside their demands for justice. The last one is technique. This means that workers must develop and clarify their understanding about it and how they could apply this, to handmade work to the industrial one. With these revolutions the modern concept of work changed. In this way, workers develop the analytic and critic way of think. Also, we can not ignore the influence of the Catholic Church inside this process. The pope Leon XIII wrote an Encíclica named Rerum Novarum. It is about the social issue about the worker class. Doing this he support the strikes and the creation of the syndicalism.

• Nowadays everything is different in terms of work quality. We could see that our actual jobs are more flexible and workers don’t be afraid to express their feelings to it. Therefore, this flexibility has good and bag points. Maybe people today tend to abuse of it. However, if we could see our reality as future teachers we will realize that until now we have to work under pressure. Our schools must work under the government needs. Also teachers must teach what is more useful to our society in order to create useful citizens.

• We could see in different texts about pedagogy that schools follow the same pattern of our society. For example, Marcia Prietto and Santos Guerra wrote about this hierarchy. The different types of power that exist inside the school context. However, we wanted or no we always will have a big image who will give us orders. So, if we think about how our society began to change their mentality in front workers needs and the big period of time that it takes we must continuing waiting for change the structure of our classes and the change of the superfluous curriculum that we are applying nowadays, everyday inside our classrooms.

As Pablo Freire said: “Decir la palabra verdadera es transformar al mundo”. So, to whom we are going to listen to? We could make the choice, as the workers did to ask for their rights.

Sources:

ª http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire

ª Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature. W.W. Norton & Company: 1974

ª http://www.miradaglobal.com