Kony 2012: Through the Eyes of Middle School Students

“Kony 2012″³ is still going strong. The video about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has gotten 83 million hits on You Tube since it was posted two weeks ago.

It’s also generated a lot of controversy for being short on accuracy and over-simplified. The video is designed to get young people to care about a distant conflict — the case of Joseph Kony who’s accused of abducting tens of thousands of children and turning them into soldiers.

The World’s Jason Margolis visited an 8th grade history class at Cambridge Friends School, a private school in Massachusetts, to get a sense of what the students there think of the film and its message.

Students were both inspired and turned off by the film. Reactions about the movie ranged from “inspiring” to “hype” to “self-indulgent.”