How Cinema Can Make Us Less "Historically Illiterate"

In an Oscars race where five of the nine nominees for Best Picture were, in some way or another, historical films, the debate about how faithful cinema must be to the past has been reignited.  Numerous critics have railed against filmmakers for taking too many liberties with their portrayals of history, accusing them of misinforming the public.  Yet when people are historically ignorant to begin with, and our children haven’t the slightest understanding of history, there is far less outrage.  This is an incongruity that is unacceptable.  

Take Argo, which won the top prize at the Academy Awards, for example.  Focused on a sidebar of the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-81, the Ben Affleck thriller took flak for inventing incidents that never really happened, in particular a tarmac chase at its climax.  However, what was more alarming to me was what happened when a friend and I went to see the movie at our local theater.  We were seated near two people, likely in their late twenties or early thirties, and we overheard one ask the other, “Wait, what country is this?”

Or how about Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln?   It caused minor outrage for accidentally misrepresenting the votes of two Connecticut congressmen on the House floor.  But where is the indignation over the fact that, according to the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress 2010 U.S. History assessment,  merely one percent of children in the fourth grade can even recognize a photograph of Honest Abe and give two reasons why he was an important figure?  Or why, at the eighth grade level, only one percent of students can identify and explain civil rights issues?  Shouldn’t it be seen as a monumental disgrace when over half of our high school seniors fail to attain even a basic level of achievement in U.S. History?

The problem isn’t confined to K-12 education.  In an interview with 60 Minutes that aired last November, historian and author David McCullough, a two-time Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winner, remarked that during lecture tours he was “stunned” at the numbers of intelligent university students who had little or no understanding of our nation’s history.  He said that one young woman told him that until she attended one of his talks, she had “never understood that the original thirteen colonies were all on the east coast.”

Ben Affleck creating a suspenseful chase scene for Argo (something that is well within his right to artistic license) is not the reason why our young people are, in the words of McCullough, “historically illiterate.”  Hollywood is, above all, an entertainment industry, not an educational endeavor.  It is not the job of historical cinema to fill in the cracks caused by the deficiencies of our academic system.  The fundamental problem is that our teachers are failing to give our children the tools to comprehend and think critically about history.

Of course, I understand as well as anyone the enormous influence that movies have on public perception of history.  But if students have a more comprehensive understanding of the subject in the first place, they will be better equipped to interpret movies about the past, and not simply take everything they see on the silver screen as fact.

Part of how we can improve the teaching of our students is by giving historical cinema a greater role in the classroom.  While textbooks are certainly more accurate when it comes to hard facts, movies can immerse our students into history like no other medium.  They present past events in a compelling, dynamic way that encourage children to gain a deeper understanding of the material at hand, showing them what it was like to live in a different time and place.  In this way, history becomes a living, breathing entity instead of a series of dates and figures that are detached from everyday experience.  Cinema imbues history with an emotional, human component that students can relate to.

This is not to say that movies should become the primary methodology for teaching history.  Textbooks are filled with prerequisite information, and thus should still be used to provide foundational knowledge to younger children.  But at higher grade levels, history education should involve a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates historical cinema.  In high school, textbooks should be used in conjunction with narrative history; books like McCullough’s 1776 that tell the stories – and speculate on the thoughts and feelings – of the people who lived the important events of our nation’s past.

Putting cinema to use as an educational tool teaches our students that the past is something that is open to interpretation.  Just like the historical record itself, cinema doesn’t spring up out of thin air, but rather arises from a series of choices made by those who create it.  

A discourse about these decisions will give younger generations a better idea of how – as individuals and as a society – our understanding of history is something that is constantly evolving.  Why did Spielberg choose to make the last months of the sixteenth president’s life the focus of Lincoln rather than taking a more broad approach?  What was the basis for Quentin Tarantino’s portrayals of the brutal slavery of the antebellum South in Django Unchained?

Opening up questions such as these for discussion in our high school classrooms actively engages students, encouraging them think critically about the past rather than simply memorize a series of facts, dates, and battles.  History is not a subject that can be learned by rote.  We need to move far away from the “teaching to the test” that is leading to a “just give us the answer” culture among students.  When history, or any subject for that matter, becomes bubbles to be filled in on a Scantron form, it’s time for a change.

No single approach will be one hundred percent effective in reversing the course of this educational decline.  Watching Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) isn’t going to make our students World War II experts overnight.  But by incorporating cinema as part of a multidisciplinary curriculum that includes nontraditional and innovative teaching methods, we can start to make improvements.  Filmmakers who deal in the past are not, and should not be, history teachers.  At the end of the day, they are working to create an artistic vision.  But their work can play a valuable part in getting generations of young Americans excited about history.