My son put together a list of older movies he wanted to watch with me, and we’ve been working through it as we get the chance. The latest was Lean on Me, the 1989 Morgan Freeman movie about a principal who takes over one of the worst high schools in New Jersey and drags it, student by student, back from the edge.
Redemption is my favorite theme in any story, because it’s the theme I live in every day. I know where I was. I know what God did for me. I know where I am now. So when a movie puts three redemption stories on the screen at once, I pay attention.
On this watch, sitting next to my kid, I noticed that none of those three redemptions happens alone. The kid needs the principal. The school needs the principal. And the principal, it turns out, needs everybody else.
The kid who begged his way back in
Sams is a young man on drugs with no direction and no father at home. Principal Joe Clark expels him on day one. The next morning Sams is back, begging to be let in.
What follows is one of the harshest tough-love scenes I’ve seen in a movie. Clark takes him up to the roof and says, in effect: you smoke crack, you’re killing yourself slowly, so why not do it fast and jump? Sams screams that he doesn’t want to die. Clark asks if he’s sure. Yes, sir. And Clark lets him back in.
I’m not recommending the method. The thing underneath it is what worked. From there you watch Sams clean up, then engage, then get better. Nobody went easy on him. For the first time there was an authority figure who refused to let him feel sorry for himself and demanded his best so he could get the best out of life. A father figure. The one he didn’t have.
The school that forgot how to hope
The movie opens in chaos. Fights in the halls, a teacher beaten in the corridor, adults too numb to hear a kid screaming for help. Worse than the violence is the hopelessness. Nobody’s going anywhere.
Clark’s first act is to put 300 of the worst offenders on the auditorium stage and throw them out. Defending himself to the school board later, he calls them 300 bad apples and says they’re in a war to save the other 2,700. Then comes the slow work: testing students to find out what they can actually do, painting over the graffiti, chaining the doors against the dealers, pushing kids past the limits they’d set for themselves.
By the end, that same student body passes the state’s minimum basic skills test and keeps its school, and at graduation you see something in their eyes that wasn’t there in the opening scene. Pride. A school full of kids who had no common direction now had one, and they walked toward it together.
The man who said “I” too much
The redemption I found most interesting was Clark’s own.
Twenty years earlier, he’d been forced out of Eastside. On his way out he said, “This place deserves exactly what it gets.” And it got it. So when the district brings him back, he’s working against his own words. He’s brilliant, angry, and harsh. He has to be, at first. Somebody had to set the tone, and nobody else was going to.
But watch what he does with the people who are on his side. He bullies the faculty the same way he bullies the dealers. Every speech is I, I, I. When the vice principal finally confronts him, she tells him he’s thoughtless and cruel, that everyone in that building cares about those kids as much as he does, and that they are sick of being treated like they don’t.
That’s the turn. By the end he stands in front of them and says it: “We sink, we swim, we rise, we fall, we meet our fate together.” It took a good friend to teach him that. He led the way, and he did his part, but the mission belonged to all of them.
I see some of myself in Joe Clark. At 20 I was headstrong and determined to do things my way, and I had the energy and the mouth to carry it for a while. Somewhere along the line I learned that team contributions have to be valued or things fall apart. Not acknowledged. Valued. There’s a difference, and the people around you know which one you’re doing.
The last image of Clark is his arm around a student, singing the school song, surrounded by kids who see him as a father. Twenty years earlier that building threw him out. Now it’s singing him back in.
Nobody gets out alone
It’s hard enough to coach your own kids through hardship. Taking somebody else’s kid under your wing and shaping him is a whole other level, and that’s what Clark did for Sams. Watching it next to my son, what I felt mostly was gratitude. I’ve been able to be a constant presence in his life.
Not a perfect one. A constant one.
