Prolific Boulder Creek filmmaker Bob Gliner was disenchanted by the negative picture painted by the 2010 documentary “Waiting for Superman.” The critically acclaimed film directed by Davis Guggenheim showed one side of the plight of public education in the United States, including some of the vast problems in inner-city schools in Washington, D.C.
Gliner’s take is a more positive one.
“It’s the complete opposite,” he said last week. “That (film) motivated me to finish this film and get it out.”
His work, titled “Lessons from the Real World,” was filmed at eight kindergarten-through-12th-grade schools in Portland, Ore. With the film, Gliner takes on negative perceptions of U.S. education and focuses on a different way of achieving success in learning.
Gliner’s focus was to show how the schools in Portland broke out of the mold of teaching to standardized tests by getting students involved in what is going on in the wider world.
“I wanted to see how the schools weave social issues into the curriculum,” Gliner said.
He worries that students are not learning about democracy in school, and that lack transfers into adulthood.
“Americans have demonstrated they don’t seem very knowledgeable about social issues that underlie elections,” Gliner said, noting that some folks he talked with recently did not realize Medicare was paid for by the government.
“I felt a lot of people are misinformed about issues,” he said. “Education is one of the fundamental ways to inform a democratic society.”
Gliner, a filmmaker for the past 30 years, spent 10 weeks in Portland last spring filming in the schools. He uses film instead of digital memory cards, because they hold too little information, he said, and he shoots roughly 60 hours of high-definition footage for each hour of finished film he produces.
A former sociology professor at San Jose State University, Gliner has traveled the world making documentaries in the past three decades.
His latest effort will be shown this week on PBS in the Bay Area and has started showing around the rest of the country.
“I hope when people see this show that they see the potential that schools have to motivate students to get them involved and become more literate citizens,” Gliner said. “It shows schools actually doing it.”
