We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

It’s dangerous to underestimate the societal value of quality public education. And yet we routinely overlook the economic problems with our school system, perhaps because they aren’t seen as urgent or media-friendly enough for the 24-hour news cycle. Luckily, The Teacher Salary Project is helping shed light on the people and stories behind under-funded public schools.

Inspired by Teachers Have it Easy, a 2005 non-fiction bestseller written by Dave Eggers, 826 National co-founder Nínive Calegari, and Daniel Moulthrop, The Teacher Salary Project is a feature-length documentary currently in production, helmed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth. They already have a wealth of material to work with thanks to Eggers and his cohorts, but the project is now seeking visual submissions from teachers across the country. If you or someone you know teaches and has something to say about it, send in a video diary, song, dance, collage or chalk drawing to The Teacher Salary Project and get your voices heard!

We spend a great deal of our childhoods– our whole lives, even– within the confines of a schoolhouse. What effect, if any, does the concrete presence of our school rooms have upon us? Do our physical, literal surroundings help shape the person that we become? How do schools instill us with ideas about class and mold our personal values? Photographer Lissa Rivera’s study in the territories of academia, Places of Education, raises these questions without providing any easy answers. Gazing into these eerily still images of empty school buildings is like stumbling upon a polaroid of an old dream. Rivera’s images reaches through the blur of primary education and pull out sharply detailed representations of our collective forgotten past.

via Good Magazine.

“Chalk drawings spotted in the schoolyard of a small rural school in Australia. Drawn on an old chalkboard by the principal over twelve years ago.”

Thanks Cameron!