Ken Burns addresses power of words in new documentary
Memorization has ‘fallen by the wayside’
The Address Tuesday, PBS, 9 ET/PT
One score and five years ago, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns unveiled his five-part series The Civil War on PBS. It changed the way viewers look at historical documentaries. More than 40 million people watched its initial broadcast, making it the most-watched program to ever air on PBS.
Burns revisits the Civil War era Tuesday with a very different film, The Address. His new film tells the story of a small school for boys with learning difficulties, ages 11-17, in Putney, Vt. where, every year, the pupils memorize Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and recite it in public. Burns sat down to a private conversation with Postmedia News earlier this year in Pasadena, Calif. The following are edited excerpts from that conversation. Q: Are we losing our collective ability to memorize in this age of screens and personal electronic devices? It seems almost as if the printed word has become passé. A: We haven’t lost our capacity to memorize the printed word. It’s just that everything in our culture suggests this isn’t something we should be doing or is cool to do. Q: Is it something that’s no longer being taught in school, or does it go deeper than that? A: It began with our schools about 50 or 60 years ago when we introduced relevancy and lost what older generations had, which was a fundamental relationship with great passages in literature, through memorizing Shakespeare, the great poems, acres of important speeches. And that has fallen by the wayside. Q: There seems to be a general feeling that the time spent on memorization in school could be better spent on other things, that this is something you’ll never use again in your lifetime. A: Memorization is hugely important. I think doing things in unison as a people is important, the way we do when we sing the national anthem at a ball game, or sing Take Me Out to the Ball Game together, or sing in church. These are things we like to do, but everything in our media culture suggests we should just be doing this, that we’re all independent free agents. Q: What about the argument that there’s not enough funding in the school system to underwrite programs like this, that it is better spent on encouraging skills students will actually use in their later lives? A: This is ridiculous. We’d been doing it when we had one-room schoolhouses that worked on a dollar a year. The excuse to get rid of memorization was that it was rote learning, which is a fairly reasonable argument. Why would you, is it any different from training dogs or monkeys or parrots, right? But in point of fact, active memorization is an effort. It imprints something on you. You learn a little bit about language. You learn a little bit about story and narrative. You do something together, when you recite it later. And you keep it. It’s there. It stays with you. Right? What’s wrong with that? The human brain has unlimited capacity to memorize.