International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

56 THE CINEMA IN TEACHING The origin of this idea is not mine. I found it for the first time in an article by Professor E. Pennacchi which appeared in this Review of Educational Cinematography in September 1930 (p 1084), and I must admit I was greatly struck by it. With his nervous, coldly scientific prose, Professor Pennacchi, who is a doctor in a provincial lunatic asylum, and therefore an expert in such cases, put his finger without error on a symptom of ill health : the symptom, that is, of child attendance at the cinema. There is no question that this sore spot in the social body esists and that people are aware of it. Recent Swiss legislation (June 1933) is a proof of this, as we can see from the Draconian regulation issued which lays down that, apart from shows specially organized for children, no child or young person under 16 may enter a cinema hall, whether accompanied by an adult or not. I do not think this is an exaggerated type of regulation. We cannot have children frequenting the cinema as and when they like. Apart from moral considerations of a more or less Calvinist character, we forget that the primary conception of education is biological rather than philosophical. If I subject my brain to periodical strains, I cannot be said to be educating it and improving it. The abuse of any organ means just the opposite of educating it. Apart from any question of the morality or immorality of its content, the film, beyond certain limits, acts like a narcotic, and any abuse of it is therefore unhealthy and undesirable. The infantile brain, a delicate organ in process of development, must be safeguarded as much as possible by law from all such dangerous influences. These facts ought in my opinion, to be kept well in mind by those who, carried away in a burst of enthusiasm, would like to cinematographize all teaching from top to bottom. The cinema is, in a way, like arsenic or strychnine. If we want to make use of it, we must administer it in minute doses. Posology is a recent branch of medical science, but one of fundamental importance. What is the idea which inspires with so much enthusiasm all the ardent defenders of the instructional cinema ? That the cinema amuses and does not weary. It will be easy then — it is argued — to make the child learn with pleasure by its means many of those things which he now learns from books without any pleasure and with considerable fatigue. I will consider the scarce intrinsic value of knowledge acquired without any exercise of the will and without effort : like the English learnt with a gramophone through the subconsciousness while shaving every morning. It is a mistake to believe that looking at a motion picture on the screen does not cost any fatigue. The pleasure we derive may disguise the most ennervating of all kinds of fatigue ; that is fatigue of the optic centres which are placed in a most delicate position in the posterior part of the brain. There is an unquestionable degree of fatigue in all the brain, in all the body, even in its muscular structure caused by witnessing pictures, and this fatigue can be registered after each projection by proper physiological apparatus suitable employed. For me this is the most significant of the studies of Pennacchi. Intense pleasure wears out our cerebral resources much more than any fatigue. The cinema in fact is so intense a pleasure that it logical on this account to be mistrustful of it. Cave voluptatem. 3. Passivity and A second objection, Activity. which is not less grave than the preceding one : how are we to conciliate the totally active policy of modern pedagogy with the absolute passivity of the child before what is shown him on the screen ? In opposition to the old methods in use in schools of the past which all more or less counted on the pupil's passivity all ready to swallow a ready made knowledge prepared in easily digestible doses, the stronger tendency of the new modern pedagogy holds that the student ought to be an active agent free to construct knowledge by himself. What he learns ought to be the fruit of his own spon