Lights, camera, teach!

— The timing couldn’t have been better.

On the eve of Presidents Day, the National Geographic Channel aired Killing Lincoln, a scripted drama based on the best-selling book by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard.

When the ratings were reported on Monday, the cable movie had drawn a record crowd for NatGeo-3.4 million people on average tuned in during the 2-hour premiere, nearly twice what the normal programming attracts.

I actually watched it on Presidents Day, taking full advantage of modern DVR technology. It was well-produced, well-done and well worth watching, as one might expect from the likes of producer Ridley Scott.

Narrator Tom Hanks is no stranger to historical productions. In 1998 he co-wrote, co-directed and executive produced From the Earth to the Moon, an HBO 12-part miniseries about the Apollo lunar expeditions. Three years later he teamed up with Steven Spielberg to help direct and produce Band of Brothers, a miniseries drawn from historian Stephen Ambrose’s book about the soldiers in E (Easy) Company during World War II.

In both docudramas, intricate attention to detail was paid in order to maximize historical accuracy and authenticity, as evidenced by their production costs (the highest at the time for both series) and their multiple awards. Hanks also co-produced John Adams in 2008, the most award winning television miniseries ever.

Great motion pictures, television movies and miniseries about history are nothing new. But as test scores for history continue to languish at low levels, it might be time to reconsider the way we structure our curricula.

Let’s start with a quick analysis. In the 1960s and 1970s there were only three station channels available on most televisions in Arkansas, and maybe a public television channel. The stations started broadcasting around five in the morning, and went off the air around midnight, often signing off with the national anthem.

During the same decades, children went to school around eight in the morning and got out around three, attending classes across more or less seven periods of roughly an hour each. The school year ran from September to May. Classrooms were organized in rows of desks, with a teacher in the front with a blackboard, and students were given books for each subject.

Fast-forward to now. I can’t even count all the channels on my digital cable box. The numbers run up into the 900s, but if I was guessing I’d probably say there were roughly 250 or maybe 300 available channels, depending on cable subscriptions for premium stations.

Much of the programming comes in the form of high-definition TV, with surround-sound technology and previously unimaginable special effects. There is no escape from the 24/7 onslaught of broadcasting: news, sports, weather, movies, comedies, series, documentaries-all available anytime on multiple channels, as well as online video. Many, like Killing Lincoln, also have interactive companion websites with additional information.

The change in how we watch and what we see on television has been nothing less than utterly revolutionary.

What about the change in how kids go to school? Class still starts roughly at eight and lets out around three, with summer vacation still a staple. Desks are still in rows, with teachers at the head of class, and heavy textbooks weigh down backpacks.

In short, even though everything about the ways children interact with information has changed (when’s the last time a child asked you about an encyclopedia?), the ABCs of primary education have clung steadfastly to last century’s tried and true trappings.

This kind of situation spells opportunity, especially for a state like ours that lags behind others in most education category rankings.

It’s time to embrace movies as teaching tools. Or, to go a step further, it’s time to partner with film production companies to create video and interactive curricula that utilizes the most powerful media (those that kids are most fluent in) as learning venues.

Students can learn much more broadly from watching well-produced historical video productions. John Adams brought many founders to life in a way that is impossible without video. Daniel Day-Lewis may well win an Oscar for his portrayal of the 16th president in Lincoln, but regardless, his performance breathed human existence into the granite visage on Mount Rushmore.

Even classic films like Gone With the Wind and Casablanca can be instructive far beyond the rote memorization of dates and places and events their stories cover.

It’s true that even the best productions contain historical inaccuracies. But what are those, except teachable moments? In John Adams, for example, liberties are taken with some timelines, such as when Adams and Thomas Jefferson resurrected their friendly correspondence. So what? All the better to point out to our youth those discrepancies, which in fact may help them to remember such details.

Arkansas should be the state that launches a bold plan to use movies to teach history in a way that will create greater impressions on students about our national heritage. Surveys show kids (and many adults) are already confused about history. School time spent with quality historical productions wouldn’t do any harm, and maybe much good.

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Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.

Editorial, Pages 15 on 02/22/2013

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