How would Hollywood approach Education and Environmental Reform?

No one knows how to fix public education and no one knows how to rescue the environment from global climate change. The public has turned against both and they have good reason to do so. Education reformers have forced a mad rush into experimentation that has alienated the public and tuned out the kids. Environmentalists have used a tone of voice that grates and now the public won’t debate the content. (The exact same thing happened with health care reform.)

Environmental non-profits and foundations now are in a closed biofeedback loop where the same 3000 people are reading each other’s tweets but failing to reach the general public, who see it as religion. Education reformers, on the other hand, have produced chaos in public education in the name of reform (charter schools, standardized testing). Many of the reformers think of this as catharsis, but chaos is just chaos. Both groups are displaying authoritarian and religious thinking, except one is warning of Revelation and one is pretending to be in charge of Genesis.

Hollywood has always understood the dangers of this…

Look at what is successful in movies, television, videogames, music and the web: sex, violence, spectacle, conflict. They are successful because they distill complex ideas into deceptively simple forms, where emotions stimulate ideas. They empower the individual by placing choices in front of them. Hollywood gets slammed by educators and environmentalists but it knows that everything must be expressed indirectly through storytelling and metaphor. Conclusions are inferred, not preached. I don’t particularly like Roland Emmerich’s films (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) but I respect his passion and commitment and he may have done more for mobilizing the public than Al Gore. While most of these films rely on apocalyptic violence, there are exceptions like Wall-E. On the education side, sex may be banished from the classroom but sexy or romantic movies and TV shows draw teens – think of Twilight or Glee or Gossip Girl of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, just to name a few contemporary ones, which are more meaningful to this generation than schoolwork, and for good reason.

I am not saying that education would be improved if teachers included more sex in the curriculum (e.g. Twilight to teach blood diseases – use your imagination please!) or if environmentalists included more emotional violence in their campaigns (e.g. PETA). What I am saying is that academic and environmental knowledge flourishes best in a hothouse of diverse opinions rooted in practical experiences. Somewhere along the line, we forgot this. We allowed the Confucian experts in to rewrite the script of our movie and it was the Taoists we really needed.