When I was growing up, my dad had a Super 8 movie camera — no sound — and he made little movies of family occasions. Looking at them today, it seems we did a lot of waving at the camera, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. By my senior year in high school, the camera wasn’t getting much use any more, so I quietly became its owner with great plans for making really cool movies. What can I say? It was 1969, and as a hardcore Beatles fan, I not only loved the music but had been swept away with A Hard Day’s Night, Help, Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour.

My dreams never amounted to anything. I’d like to blame the primitive equipment, how nearly impossible it was to do editing, or my lack of access to anyone who could help me learn the craft, but the real issue was that I had no talent. My medium was words, not film, and although I now work for public television, it’s fortunate for everyone that my job is about using film as a powerful tool in teaching and learning, rather than creating it.

It was also fortunate for me that formal education privileges people who like working with words rather than other forms of communication. As a result, I always did well in school while others who were just as capable — maybe even more so — weren’t as successful because their strengths were in areas that school didn’t value. That value structure is totally arbitrary, of course, and for as long as anyone can remember young people with other kinds of strengths have had a hard time in school even though they flourish as adults. The story of George Lucas is well-known. Sir Kenneth Robinson, speaking at the Celebration of Teaching & Learning in March 2009, told a packed house in the Hilton ballroom about a high school teacher in Liverpool who had two future Beatles in his class and saw no talent in either of them. Can you imagine having John Lennon and Paul McCartney in your class and considering them failures? To adapt Cassius’s line from Act I of Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear reader, is not in our students but in our schools!�

In recent years, my colleagues in the Education Department at Thirteen/WNET have had the chance to work with an inspired group of student filmmakers. In 2007, we got some money in connection with Ken Burns’ series, THE WAR, which allowed us to partner with Reel Works, an organization that was founded in 2001 by John C. Williams at the Prospect Park YMCA. Today it’s an independent out-of-school program working with about 150 teens each year out of its offices in Park Slope. Reel Works is also one of the partner organizations in Adobe’s international, multi-year initiative called Adobe Youth Voices. (Visit www.plantandinspire.org to learn more about the program and see a gallery of outstanding work by teens.)

We gave the Reel Works students a challenge: come up with a film in response to THE WAR. A team of a half-dozen or so accepted the challenge, and they worked their tails off, subjecting themselves to several rounds of grueling meetings with our producers in the standard process that professional filmmakers go through as things move from ideas to rough cuts to final production. We told the kids we’d put their film on Thirteen’s web site, but made no promises beyond that. Their concept was terrific — gather stories from people who were their age during WWII and therefore too young to enlist. It was a great idea, but lots of great ideas fail in the execution. Not this one. It turned out to be so good that we aired the program in primetime and posted it on Apple’s iTUNES U, where it had a great run. Even the title was smart. They called the film “Over Here.� (You can watch the film online at www.thirteen.org/newyorkwarstories/overhere.html.)

This past year we got a similar opportunity with Ken Burns’ new series “National Parks,� and once again we called John Williams to see if his filmmakers wanted another partnership with us. Fortunately, they did, but by this time there was a new group of students in the program, and they came up with a different idea. They wanted to explore the parks of New York City, and decided to have six filmmakers develop mini-stories that would then be stitched together into a fully integrated piece. They went through the same exhausting process, and managed to come up with the same high quality product. We aired their program, “City of Parks,� in primetime immediately following the first two hours of the Burns series. In their film, the teens explore Mannahatta, Federal Hall, Governor’s Island, Floyd Bennett Field, Grant’s Tomb, and the African Burial Ground, but this is no travelogue or field trip - it’s a powerful narrative of what the students experienced, a unique treatment of these sites. The viewer learns what these places mean to the filmmakers, not a teen’s rehashing of a series of tired facts. How I wish I could have gotten my high school English students to engage with novels, short stories, and poems the way these kids immersed themselves in the parks! (You can watch “City of Parks� at www.thirteen.org/localparks/ city-of-parks/city-of-parks.)

Besides the unqualified excellence of these two films, the educator/parent in me most of all marvels at the enormous amount of time and energy these kids put into their work. They worked as a team and as individuals, sought out guidance from experts in the field, went through the tortured back-and-forth process of writing and rewriting, editing and re-editing, choosing music and graphics … and meeting a strict deadline. They also developed true 21st century skills in terms of learning to use all kinds of new technologies connected with filmmaking. I have no idea how these same students do in school, but knowing schools as I do, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they are far less successful and that some of them are even considered “problems� by their teachers.

New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein understands that schools need to expand their opportunities and honor and cultivate different kinds of student talent beyond language and math. In mid-October, the City’s Education Department released its new “Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts: The Moving Image.�

In recent years similar efforts have included dance, music, theater, and visual arts, but this is the first official statement affirming the value of film, television, and animation, and it encourages engagement from early elementary through high school. The Department combined forces with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting and the Tribeca Film Institute, among others, in developing the Blue Print, and Chase provided essential financial support. It’s an encouraging sign that New York schools are interested in moving beyond the limited curricular areas defined by how the state tests students.

Such efforts are not about turning all kids into filmmakers, nor do they disadvantaged kids — like me — who don’t have such talents. Instead, they make the doorway to success wider, allowing more students to cross that threshold and build the skills and interests that will serve them well in their lives. Out-of-school programs like Reel Works have known for years that young people have a broad range of talents waiting to be developed. Students shouldn’t have to spend the bulk of their days and early years frustrated and defeated by a menu of school-based opportunities that is artificially and arbitrarily limited, and as a country we shouldn’t be wasting resources on an agenda that is and always has been too narrow to nurture all of the talents our children have.

And when it comes to the all-important testing and assessment of these “other� subjects, the proof is where it should be: in the final product. We don’t have to invest a whole lot of money in creating a standardized test to see whether the young people at Reel Works learned what they were supposed to learn. All we have to do is watch the film.

Most important, our society needs people whose contributions go beyond a few specific academic pursuits. Those needs should be met with the help of, and in some cases because of schools, not in spite of them.

Ronald Thorpe is Vice President and Director of Education at WNET.org, parent company of Thirteen/WNET, WLIW21, and Creative News Group, the public television stations for Metropolitan New York City and Long Island. He oversees a 25-person department dedicated to extending the value of public television’s resources beyond broadcast and especially into preK-12 education.

Among other initiatives, Dr. Thorpe is responsible for the annual Celebration of Teaching & Learning, a two-day professional development conference for more than 8,000 teachers and administrators. Write to Ron at thorpe@thirteen.org.

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