Conrack Pat Conroy Analysis

Pat Conroy’s was a late 20th century American author of Southern literature inspiring the late 20th century movie Conrack (1974) with his autobiography The Water is Wide (1972). With help of 20th century Fox; director Martin Ritt, screen play writers Harriet Franklin Jr and Irving Ravitch the small; impoverished, segregated island of Yamacraw of the coast of South Carolina, and the failing systematics of public education are brought to life. As stated on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071358/ Conrack beings with John Voight playing role of Conroy a young white male starting a new job as a teacher on Daufuskie island, an island inhabited only by African Americans, at an Elementary in the late 60’s during the Civil Rights Era and Vietnam War.

Conroy’s teaching, methods are soon frown down upon and his job is soon threaten. Although Conroy has taught the children an array of things range from like skills to classical music he takes it too far when he disobeys his superior, in Conrack he rise up from his chair and tells the superintendent “you can do as you see fit but I’m bring those kids a cross that river”. Subsequently the child played the very same music of “death” by the late Mozart as he rides back across the river after losing his job. Although Conrack was released forty three years ago, the problems in American public education that it identifies continue to persist in our nation’s public schools today, including the system’s aim to denigrate and control people in order to fit them for the corporate workforce through repressing their individuality and self-expression, locking them into a perpetual state of boredom and childishness, and keeping them in ignorance by depriving them of a broad or liberal