Parents in Londonderry awhile ago found themselves pitted against the more
"enlightened" folk, when a middle-school principal canceled a
scheduled screening of the film Schindler's List for an audience of eighth-graders.
The film is a critically acclaimed and powerful adaptation of Thomas Keneally's
novel about a German industrialist who saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazi
holocaust.
In spite of its undeniable merits, Schindler's List is rated R, and many
parents objected that it was too intense for their 13-year olds. The principal
agreed and, predictably, she and the parents quickly came under fire for
"censorship" at the next school board meeting.
I do not recall having seen it reported in connection with this story, but
a similar controversy erupted last year in Utah over a canceled showing
of Schindler's List at Brigham Young University. BYU has a policy against
screening unedited R-rated films on campus. Since university officials were
informed by the film's distributors that editing was out of the question,
it was not shown.
BYU's Provost Bruce Hafen explained, "BYU's institutional unwillingness
to endorse any unedited R movies stems from the conviction that Hollywood
should find ways to make its films - regardless of the intrinsic value of
the subject matter - in ways that respect the boundaries of public propriety
that existed before what Walter Berns calls 'the publification of sex.'"
That is an excellent point, and what is good policy at a university should
be doubly good at a middle school. After all, graphic violence, nudity and
sex, all of which are there to be seen in Schindler's List, should not be
standard fare for eighth-graders. That is, at any rate, the point of view
of the average, sane parent. But there is a more fundamental objection which
we should not overlook. Educators must not give in to the seductive notion
that youngsters will not learn certain lessons unless they are packaged
as entertainment.
There was a time in the not so distant past when students who were studying
the Holocaust would read a book about it, say The Diary of Anne Frank. Four
hours a day of instructional time, 180 days a year, are too precious to
squander on movies, when young minds full of mush need to be formed. For
reasons deeply imbedded in human nature, culture is best transmitted by
literary forms. These create indelible images in the mind's eye more enduring
than any creation of Hollywood. There are compelling reasons why reading
Schindler's List is a more authentic experience that watching the movie.
This point has been brilliantly enlarged upon by Neil Postman in his book,
Amusing Ourselves To Death.
"To engage the written word," notes Postman, "means to follow
a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making
and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions and overgeneralizations,
to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas
to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization with another."
No other activity engages the mind so fully as reading. It seems such an
obvious point, and yet literacy does not occupy the central place in education
which it held a generation ago. Teachers rush like lemmings from the printed
page to other media - videotapes and computer software. The result, not
surprisingly, is culturally illiterate American kids who can tell you that
The Last of the Mohicans is really a great movie, but who have never heard
of James Fenimore Cooper.
Postman concludes that the decline of literacy foreshadows a grim future:
not, he adds, the totalitarian future of Orwell's 1984, but the mind-numbing
future of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. "In the Huxleyan prophecy,
Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There
is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population
becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual
round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form
of baby-talk, when, in short people become an audience and their public
business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death
is a real possibility."
I am not sure whether there is a reliable test for measuring the cultural
health of our society, but when we start getting worked into a lather about
parents who are keeping movies out of the classroom, it is time that we
start checking our pulse.
Rob Rabuck resides in Concord, New Hampshire and is an assistant United
States
Attorney.
