Ken Burns is a brilliant filmmaker who has been praised by historians and Hollywood alike for producing fair and insightful documentaries, which have explored both the ordinary and the extraordinary people, places, and subjects that have helped shape our nation. From the citizens of the towns of Mobile, Alabama, Sacramento, California, Waterbury, Connecticut, and Luverne, Minnesota, whom he highlights in "The War," to "Thomas Jefferson," "Jazz," and "Baseball," Mr. Burns has a proven natural proclivity for exposing the human side of those themes that have created this country and culture that we have come to know as America.
During his remarks at the Equinox Hotel last week, Mr. Burns stepped beyond his own profession to give a scathing rebuke of the American educational system. He suggested that we - schools, school boards, departments of education, and the like - are missing the proverbial boat when it comes to educating our children. According to Mr. Burns, our fascination with standards of learning and cute technology is reducing our effectiveness; our attention is being diverted from the schooling of our children to feeding something akin to an "education industrial complex." Rather, he argued, we ought to focus on teaching the lessons that our forebears learned as they struggled to build this country and enrich the lives of its people. Mr. Burns is right, and his observation merits a response.
Approximately 1,000 veterans of the "Greatest Generation" are dying every day; with them pass their stories of courage, dignity, and compassion. Too often our curricula overlook these lessons in favor of a cursory study that fails to stimulate excitement in our classrooms. We "check the box" indicating that we covered a particular topic or time period, but, in reality, we blast through the course outline celebrating how far we got without allowing time for the deep investigation and thoughtful reflection for which Mr. Burns longs. The result is an education that is wasteful in its efficiency. We try to cover a little bit of a lot of stuff only to realize that the lack of depth creates no staying power in our student's, and our society's, collective memories. That is a shame.
Daily our educators are faced with the great dilemma to determine what is relevant and necessary in the education of our students. To be sure, we cannot teach it all. There is more history in America today than there was in 1945, and the school year has not gotten any longer. But, somehow we have to make time for the stories that the subjects in Mr. Burns' latest film tell. Parents and communities play important roles in this process, and I commend organizations like Northshire Bookstore for its efforts to extend education beyond the formal classroom. But if we do not embrace the important lessons that the Greatest Generation taught and teaches us, we will have failed.
In his Gettysburg Address, arguably the greatest speech in American history, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the responsibility that the current generation has in honoring our ancestors and advancing the cause for which they fought and died. He said,
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced."
Let us - families, schools, and regional and national education boards - rededicate ourselves to this solemn goal so that those who came before us will not have struggled in vain.
This article was originally published in the ManchesterJournal and can be found at http://www.manchesterjournal.com/oped/ci_7660538
