The view from inside the greenhouse: why the right is wrong about ‘The Story of Stuff’

Image by pedrosimoes7 via Flickr

In my day, when it rained during recess our teachers entertained us with filmstrips from the library. We sat cross-legged on the floor, with the projector humming, its beam flickering in the dark, thunder crashing outside and rain pounding the roof, and the filmstrips impressed our minds like that machine at the mint that stamps faces on coins. Or did they?

I remember two especially. One was a cartoon in which a mighty voice roared from a cave: “I am invincible!” I learned a new word from that cartoon, and I learned something else: although the speaker turned out to be a tiny fellow, his thunderous voice placed him among the powerful beasts of the forest.

The second was a movie set in a bleak, polluted future, gray with fog and black with muck, where nothing grows, and people must wear gas masks to filter the filth from the air. But one man has quietly preserved the earth’s last bubble of clean air in a back-yard greenhouse. Plants thrive there, birds flick from tree to tree, snakes slither through the grass. The man enters his greenhouse, takes off his gas mask, and breathes.

It would be lovely to think these two filmstrips turned me into an environmental writer. I am a tiny fellow in the grand scheme of things, like the character in the cartoon, doing my best to project my voice so that the scenario of the movie never comes to pass. If these two filmstrips turned me into an environmental writer, I owe thanks to some teachers and librarians for a rewarding life. But they didn’t. They only touched two interests—writing and nature—that I had already long possessed.

Writing began with awe at the power of books to evoke other worlds. Environmentalism began with awe at this world.

Why are children’s books almost always about animals? Why are children so fascinated by creatures, flowers, dirt—all the marvels and mysteries of the earth? A love for this planet is etched into us from the start, inseparable from a love for life.

But then something happens to some, who lose it. Maybe it happens in school.

The Heritage Foundation, feeling perhaps a bit exposed, has labeled “The Story of Stuff” a propaganda film (see related post). It asks, “Now, the million dollar question is, how is this video getting into the classroom?”

Teachers, no doubt—teachers like the teachers I had. “Schoolteachers turning kids anti-capitalist with Story of Stuff,” worries a headline in DailyFinance.com, an AOL money and finance site. It’s hard for me to imagine capitalism, having survived Karl Marx and the legions of misinterpreters he inspired, succumbing to a 20-minute classroom video that succinctly and frankly explains how the American economy works.

The truth is, students who love nature will love the message of this film. Students prone to love business will love the system it exposes.

Consider all that schools accomplish for capitalism. They teach students the obvious skills they need in order to work—reading, writing, arithmetic—but schools also teach students to get up early and dress properly and commute, to arrive at certain places at certain times and to complete certain tasks, to sit quietly and listen, to give authority to the person standing at the front of the room, to stand in line, to wait, to be good subjects—in a word, to work. Whether you’re in calculus or P.E., you’re learning to work. Even if you’re watching an “anti-consumerist” film, you’re learning to work. But you’re also learning what’s on the other side of the coin.