It’s not my favorite thing to keep checking on the Plugged In Poll today. But I keep doing it anyway.
The results are just not going my way, you see. We asked, “What do you think about teachers using movies—historical dramas such as Lincoln—in classrooms for middle school and high school?” And I honestly expected a flood of “poor” to “horrid” responses. Instead, only about 25% of the folks clicking their way through our home page and Facebook page are picking those categories, while more than half were snapping up “good” to “great.” As in, “It’s a great thing. It keeps the kids engaged with learning.”
You see, I was the editor here at Plugged In who wrote the headline to our lead Culture Clip this week: “Accuracy Schmackuracy.” And once you read this, you’ll see right away where I was coming from on the subject:
“I’m proud that Lincoln’s fidelity to and illumination of history has been commended by many Lincoln scholars. But I respectfully disagree with the Congressman’s contention that accuracy in every detail is ‘paramount’ in a work of historical drama,” says Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner, responding to Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney’s criticism that Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated historical drama takes liberties with the facts when it comes to how congressmen from his state voted on the 13th Amendment to outlaw slavery. (In the film, two out of three of the politicians voted against it—a vote for continuing slavery. In reality, all four Connecticut congressmen voted in favor of the amendment.) Kushner continues, “Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here’s my rule: Ask yourself, ‘Did this thing happen?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s historical. Then ask, ‘Did this thing happen precisely this way?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it’s historical drama.”
It’s noteworthy that one of Lincoln’s production companies, Participant Media, has just announced it will be distributing the PG-13 film to every public junior high and high school in America when it’s released on DVD later this year. “As more and more people began to see the film, we received letters from teachers asking if it could be available in their classrooms,” Spielberg said of the initiative. “We realized that the educational value that Lincoln could have was not only for the adult audiences—who have studied his life in history books—but for the young students in the classroom as well.”
I absolutely get what lots of you are saying by way of our poll. Movies certainly do trump “dry” lectures when it comes to kids remembering the material. Most of us are pretty visual people. We remember the contents of a cool movie far more than whatever is being conveyed via that droning noise emanating from somewhere near the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. One need look no further than Charlie Brown’s teacher, who always spoke in that rather musical “Wah-wah waah-WAH waaaah” voice, to grasp that concept. So I’m clearly not arguing that video is somehow an inferior method of communication.
Here’s what I am arguing: Showing kids historical drama isn’t getting the job done when it comes to teaching the facts about our collective past. These movies simply aren’t designed for that. You just read from Lincoln’s screenwriter, saying that the job of historical drama is not “accuracy in every detail.”
Which is exactly what our goal should be when it comes to education.
Even when teachers pick apart a movie and tell their students where the cinematic script diverges from the real-world one, the lasting impact on more kids than just that one slouching sullenly in the back row is the intellectual stimulus the movie delivers. Not the corrective measures the teacher may try to engineer afterwards.
Of course, history textbooks aren’t always accurate in every detail either. But that’s a whole different blog post.
Recent Comments