Joe Mathews: How movies can serve to educate our kids

Joe Mathews
Zócalo Public Square

California teachers, you should be showing your students more movies.

Joe Mathews

And not for babysitting purposes. As our state considers new frameworks for how history and social science are taught, now is the time to incorporate that signature California art – film – into classes at every grade level. Movies should be placed at the center of our efforts to teach history – especially the history of California.


MORE MATHEWS: Read all of Joe Mathews' columns

You’d be surprised how many people have no idea where that reference comes from. As someone who must deal with young Californians – as father, coach, and journalistic colleague of millennials with fancy college degrees – I’m struck by how little they know of films, and thus of California’s history. The film critic and historian Neal Gabler has warned that movies that once united the generations now divide us, “leaving us with an endless stream of the very latest with no regard for what came before. Old movies are now like dinosaurs, and like dinosaurs, they are threatened with extinction.”

This is not a trivial matter; it is the loss of the essence of our state’s history. The California we know – in reality and image – was made by motion picture. And our greatest films are California monuments. To be ignorant of them is akin to being Chinese without knowing of Confucius, or to being German without having read Goethe.

So let the education begin now. “Rosebud” is the signature word of the 1941 film "Citizen Kane," ranked No. 1 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest films of all time. "Citizen Kane" is a fictionalization of the life of a towering figure of American and California history: the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. His story remains relevant in today’s state of new media titans with outsized appetites. And the Hearst Castle in San Simeon is a landmark every Californian should visit.

But when you look through the state standards for class content – what all California children are supposed to learn – you won’t find one word about Hearst or "Citizen Kane," and only brief mentions of film. The good news: California is drafting a new history framework – long outlines of what California students should be taught in each grade and subject. The bad news: the current draft on California history says nothing about film, movies, or Hollywood.

To this inexcusable omission, my reaction is the memorable line from "Network:" “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” (This line is a staple of campaigns from Proposition 13 to the 2003 gubernatorial recall.)

California history guidelines must include films that shaped America’s very conception of itself, from "Casablanca" to "The Searchers." They also should require California history in high school, not just elementary school, so more mature themes can be taught.

No one should get a degree from a California high school without seeing the classics that are signatures of our state’s history. These should start with Alfred Hitchcock’s "Vertigo" – the essential film of Northern California – and "Chinatown" – which explains, better than any other document, Southern California’s dark view of itself.

Incorporating film into class is not a new idea. You’ll find electives in the art and history of film in dozens of California high schools. Now we must overcome the prejudice that movies are entertainment not educational tools, and build our history classes around film.  Movies illuminate historian Kevin Starr’s juxtaposition of “the California of fact and the California of imagination.” For example, you could teach California’s water history by comparing the fictions of "Chinatown" with non-fiction books.

Audrey Hepburn said: “Everything I learned I learned from the movies.” Never heard of her? Get to classic movie night at Vine Cinema in Livermore. They’re showing "Breakfast at Tiffany’s."
