I was just reading about Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job, which chronicles the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. From the AP article:
“I had several goals,” said Ferguson, whose 2007 Iraq War study “No End in Sight” was nominated for best documentary at the Academy Awards. “One was just to show people actually this isn’t that complicated. They don’t have to fear that they can’t understand. They actually can understand what happened here. It was pretty straightforward, in fact.”
As a former teacher, such devotion to explanation really makes me happy. It also depresses me a bit.
Most teachers get into teaching because they want to make a difference. They want to explain important things to people, just as Ferguson did. But how much difference does a teacher really make? At the college level, not much. Despite the fact that right-wingers like to howl about liberal academics corrupting the youth of America, studies continue to show that most students have already decided on their political bent by the time they reach college, and professors don’t change that.
Then there are the numbers. By my own calculations I “reached” maybe 500 students in five years at Vanderbilt. That doesn’t sound so bad at first. But I had a rude awakening when I published several eHow articles, just for kicks. Within a few months, a thousand people had looked at them. A thousand. Twice the number in a tenth of the time. Which convinced me that it’s less about what you’re saying and more about the media you use.
Good documentarians might be better teachers than any of us. This is debatable, I admit. You could talk about hours spent in the classroom vs. length of movie, or about the fact that documentaries are not tremendously popular entertainment. Still, it’s something to think about. If you really care about your subject, how much difference can you make teaching a set canon, in an atmosphere that doesn’t encourage you to teach opinions, to a bunch of kids that haven’t actually chosen to be there?