World Film and Television Progress (1938)

"There is no excuse for the offensive" ("The Charge of the Light Brigade") FOUR out of FIFTY would haye gone to war. A school debate on War, described by Thomas Baird THE ribbon of concrete road stretched across the dark rich fields of Wisconsin. The last traces of winter snow still lay in the hollows. The car drew up alongside a little one-story red brick building. About a hundred yards further on was a growth of houses clustered round the cross-roads. On all sides the flat fields, with their shrivelled stocks of last year's corn, ran back to the far horizon. Inside the school house a stove was burning, and a teacher talking to a bright-looking class. I stood at the side of the room admiring the wall pictures. There was a very good selection of photographs and some work by the children themselves. Then I saw it. It was hanging on the long wall opposite the main windows. The yellow sun was shining in on it. It was real enough. But how fantastic! Coming over these vast farm lands my head had swum in an effort to grasp the huge distance. My head swam again. I closed my eyes, then opened them quickly. It was still there. It was a map of the world. But what a map. Right in the centre was Wisconsin, to the left was the Pacific and to the right, the Atlantic. far to the right was Great Britain, and then Norway; far to the left was China, Australia and Russia. The world was cockeyed. The whole world had been twisted just to suit this little red school house in Wisconsin. But they had just as much right to twist it to suit them as I had to make London or Greenwich or Kensington the centre of the world. For them this little red school house is the centre of the world. 26 But I realised that the map in my red school house had given me a special cast of thought about the lay-out of the world : these children were getting another cast, just as powerful, just as wrong. One has only to think to realise how many attitudes are born and formed this way, many of them more important than our conception of a globe we shall probably never travel. It was just when I was speculating on this theme — on our ready-made attitudes and on the attitudes we never acquire because our teachers cannot make them ready-made — that I visited a school in New York. I went in the company of Dr. Alice V. Keliher of the Human Relations Commission of the Progressive Education Association. Dr. Keliher and her Commission are trying to devise ways and means of discussing in the classroom those subjects which have never been taught because they have been conceived among the unteachables. They are difficult to formalise, and so they have not been taught. Dr. Keliher's material is the ordinary, everyday problems of individuals in their relations with other human individuals. There are not text books with solutions to all the problems of the relation of father and son, boy and boy, man and man, and man and girl. There are still fewer guides to the problems of the individual in his human relations with society. But Dr. Keliher doesn't want rules and ready-made guides to conduct: she wants children to discuss the problems at their own level and form their own attitudes. She uses many techniques, but perhaps the most interesting is her use of film. She has secured permission to re-edit theatrical films which contain a human relations problem. This she makes a case. She has re-edited Fury, The Man I Killed, the character of the mother from Cavalcade, the character of the conscientious objector from Private Jones, the young delinquent in The Devil is a Sissy, and many more. The school class we visited was to see The Man I Killed (known in the U.S. as Broken Melody). With only a slight prior comment the re-cut film was shown. The story was cut down to the following situation : A sensitive young musician has been haunted by the face of a young German musician he killed during the war, who had not lifted a hand to defend himself, and was in the act of writing to his family when he died. The Frenchman is at the point of collapse, and goes to the church for help. He tells the priest that he has murdered a man, but when the priest has heard his confession, and realises that the man was killed in the trenches, he gives the musician absolution, telling him he had only done his duty. "Duty?" says the boy, "Duty? Duty to kill?' Is this the only answer I can get in the house of God?" The priest can give him no comfort, but advises that the boy go to Germany, to the family of the soldier he killed, and try to seek their forgiveness. He goes to Germany, and seeks out the family of the dead German. The German father at first tries to turn him out of the house just because he is a Frenchman, and "millions of dead lie between us", but is interrupted by the dead boy's mother and fiancee who welcome the Frenchman, whom they have seen putting flowers on their boy's grave. They assume he has known the German in Paris, and he finds himself accepted in the family as a friend. The German father finds his beer-drinking companions in the town tavern wish to ostracise him because he is entertaining a hated Frenchman in his home, and the old man is roused