Everyone is created equal

    This film delivers the expected messages about hope and the ability to change one’s destiny, and does it in a manner that it is emotionally and intellectually satisfying.
    The film is set in Long Beach shortly after the L.A. riots. Hilary Swank plays Erin Gruwell, a crusading young woman who believes the way to stop racial hatred is to influence young minds. To that aim, Erin Gruwell applies to work in a forcibly integrated school where the students are divided into four camps: whites, Latinos, Cambodians, and blacks. At the beginning, she faces a great challenge in the school. Her lofty goals are not shared by her department head, Margaret Campbell, her ex-activist father, or her neglected husband. Erin’s first few days in class are a rude awakening. She finds that her students are a nightmare of all the teachers of the school. The students segregate themselves into racial groups in the classroom, fights break out, and eventually most of the students stop turning up to class. Not only does Erin meet opposition from her students, but she also has a hard time with her department head, who refuses to let her teach her students with books in case they get damaged and lost, and instead tells her to focus on teaching them discipline and obedience. Erin Gruwell manages to keep the children away from the hatred and dispel the hostility between them, but, as a white teacher, the children set up hard core wall to her. In this situation, her education ideal always hits the wall. However, in her efforts, the turning point emerges. A discussion about Hitler and the Holocaust opens unexpected doors and the teacher begins to connect with some of her students, including the hardcore Eva and the closed-off Andre. She devotes herself to caring about the life of her students. Erin hands out composition books and has the teenagers make daily entries. She gradually begins to earn their trust and buys them composition books to record their diaries, in which they talk about their experiences of being abused, seeing their friends die, and being evicted. Determined to reform her students, she takes two part-time jobs to pay for more books and spends more time at school, to the disappointment of her husband. Her students start to behave with respect and learn more as well. Unfortunately, her husband divorces her and Margaret tells her she cannot teach her kids for their junior year. She fights this decision, eventually convincing the superintendent to allow her to teach her kids' junior and senior year. The film ends with a note that Gruwell successfully brought many of her students to graduation and college. In 1999, those "assignments" were published as The Freedom Writers Diary, which is the source material for the movie.
    The film does not deliberately create myth, and not try to render greatness of a person. It just tells us that everyone is created equal. Kindness and love is the instinct of a man. As long as we treat everyone with kindness and love, the world will become more peaceful.