Last month, I found myself unexpectedly drawn into a nearly three‑hour conversation between documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and podcaster Joe Rogan. In a world dominated by short-form TikToks and Instagram Reels, Rogan’s sprawling podcasts feel anachronistic. Yet his tens of millions of subscribers can’t be wrong; there’s still an audience for the long form.

Similarly large crowds tune in to Burns’s 10- to 20-hour documentaries about jazz, baseball, the Civil War, and Vietnam. The popularity of both men’s work is counterintuitive. There’s a fascinating tension between brevity and breadth, suggesting that people still crave depth. Both entertainers offer space to dive deep into stories that resonate. Their audiences want time to sit with complex ideas.

I witnessed this same hunger as I implemented Don Hirsch’s Core Knowledge program in my Brooklyn elementary charter school. What connects Rogan, Burns, and exciting classrooms is not trivia-contest, Jeopardy!-like facts, but knowledge—the kind that’s built, tier upon tier, through thoughtful instruction. Burns’s films can spark curiosity, but unless kids are broadly educated, his best observations will fly past them like a Bob Gibson fastball. Students need a scaffolded curriculum to sustain understanding.

Take, for instance, the best classrooms I visit on the Knowledge Matters School Tour. Over 7 years we’ve visited 50 schools across the country to highlight replicable practices for early grades instruction. In these knowledge-building classrooms, teachers don’t lean on films alone to deliver content. They provide students with context so that the knowledge they learn sticks. They read diaries, newspaper stories, and even historical fiction. They compare timelines and examine an event from different perspectives. They build mental schemas—through text sets, vocabulary practice, and writing—about why events happened the way they did. It’s cumulative.

Students in these classrooms emerge capable of weighing the ideals of George Washington against his contradictions. They can understand that moral complexity is a feature of being human, not a bug. This is an animating principle of Burns’s work. He told Rogan of a neon sign that hangs in his editing room that says, “It’s complicated.” He observed, “If you only tell about perfect people, you either lie or you don’t have many characters in your story.”

It’s that kind of nuance that invites critical thinking—the acme of good teaching. It invites conversation, not polemics.

Burns and Rogan discussed how the thousand-yard stare on the face of a 22-year-old paratrooper depicted in his Vietnam documentary (shown above) transmits empathy in a way text alone cannot. But, as a reviewer wrote in 2017, “Yes, you’ve seen these images before. But to have even a chance at understanding this mess, you have to go back. Way back.” Burns is right that empathy matters, but without background knowledge, it’s an empty vessel.

One concern I have is that, like the owner of a hammer for whom every problem is a nail, Burns implies films can fix what Rogan called “stale, boring classrooms.” I want to push back, affectionately. Yes, documentaries are educational gifts, but only if they’re embedded in rich instruction. Students need to read, to write, to interrogate, to challenge. They need repeated exposure to ideas—not just once via film, but through repeated historical examples, well-crafted narrative, and opportunities to defend their claims in writing. Students absorb language and content best when they encounter them again and again, over time and through varied methods of delivery.

What does a classroom that does this look like? Picture students who:

• analyze multiple primary sources about European settlement in North America—letters and artifacts are accessible to students at all grade levels.

• debate interpretations of the Declaration of Independence, repeatedly revisiting its significance as they read related documents and biographies.

• write short arguments on historical complexity, such as how some Founders reconciled liberty and slavery.

• build vocabulary to expand knowledge across different aspects of historical study—legal terms in civics, military terms in war studies—allowing deeper understanding and retention.

I agree with Rogan’s and Burns’s observation that we’ve “taken the fun out of history,” draining civics and ethics from school. But I also know students can handle complexity. When we give them time and the right tools, they want to wrestle with contradictions. They want narrative and knowledge. They want context and nuance. Not fairy tales.

Today’s students are more likely to conduct research on YouTube than in books. Thoughtful history curriculum is essential to building their stamina to handle long-form texts, not just podcasts and film, especially when it builds the background knowledge that grants them access to the fuller story.

So, here’s what I’m carrying forward: In a world that prizes speed and flash, Rogan’s listeners still crave time. Burns provides it visually. But history teaches best when curiosity meets structure. Depth sustained by deliberate design—that’s history education worth its name, the kind that builds citizens capable of thinking deeply about who we were, who we are, and who we might become.

This November, in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, Burns will ask us to spend six nights and 12 hours looking back at The American Revolution. Millions will.

His documentary may inspire and even inform some viewers; the triumph of 1776 is a critical story, both for American history and human development globally. But without knowledge and understanding of the forces at play and the implications it wrought, will viewers appreciate it for more than just infotainment?

Gifted as he is, Ken Burns can’t deliver this alone. If America is, as Lincoln called it, “the last best hope of earth,” we need to demand more of our instructional materials—more knowledge, more understanding, and a greater sense of civics, history, and self. Starting in the earliest grades, we need to invest in curricula that ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”.

Matthew Levey founded the International Charter School and co-leads the History Matters Campaign. He is a contributor to the blog “In the Know.”