The Video Generation and the Montage Mentality

Several years ago I watched a series on PBS called “Frontier House”. During the series, three modern families lived in Montana for five months as if it were 1880. The adults and the children lived as our pioneer forefathers did; building houses, milking cows, killing and plucking chickens, raising their own food, harvesting crops and cutting firewood. Working to support the family was the daily norm from oldest to youngest.
 

As fascinating as the series was, the part that really intrigued me were the follow up interviews conducted months after the experience. Particularly telling was the conversation with the two girls who were twelve and thirteen during the filming. They felt lost in modern life. They explained that what they had done on the frontier mattered, their work was necessary to sustain the family. But back in modern suburbia, there lives lacked purpose.

For centuries storytellers have compressed events for the sake of brevity, years of waiting, weeks of training, months of building, the passing of seasons. These have often been given only a passing nod in stories. The audience, even children, understood what weeks of work meant and how that felt to the characters in the story. Even 40 years ago children were very likely to be involved in the family business, urban or rural, in very real and important ways.

We are now teaching a generation of children, who are being raised by a generation of parents, who frequently spent their childhoods playing. The idea of children doing real, sustained, hard, meaningful work, physical or mental, has become a foreign concept.

Before I become another geezer grumbling about “kids these days”, allow me to connect the dots back to video.

We are dealing with children, and possibly more importantly, parents, who have seen most of life’s problems and long-term commitments to growth with a “Montage Mentality.” For the sake of the story, we watch children grow up, civilizations rise and fall, buildings constructed and years of training pass, all in a matter of minutes and all as a relatively small part of whatever we happen to be watching. A beautiful montage of pictures and sound.

When we use video to teach we frequently run into the same issues. Who wants to watch the Pilgrims endlessly sailing for more than 20 seconds? It’s hard to sit and watch pyramids being built for more than a minute or so. The Oregon Trail is traversed in moments not months. Even when teaching my students to create their own videos my mantra is “cut it, cut it cut it”!

So, now that I’ve ranted for several paragraphs, what are the solutions? I don’t know and even if I did I might not tell you. Because at its heart, teaching isn’t about conveying facts, it’s about raising questions and equipping learners to seek the answers.