The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

218 The Educational Screen contagious diseases are caused by a vegetable growth; socialists and bankers in alliance cannot prevent war; Latin may not be essential to culture; Charles Chaplin is melan- choly; movies can be esthetic. For my part I am ready to learn that the film can be a powerful agency in education. But teachers must be shown; and —here is the great point—we must see the kind of proof that convinces practical workers. What consti- tutes a demonstration in a psycho- logical laboratory may be worth nothing to us mere laborers with youth. For we have had too much and too painful experience with tests under experimental conditions, with statistics and tabulations that prove everything to a detached in- vestigator, but that are vacuous to an artisan. The shores of educa- tional psychology are strewn with wrecks of full-sailed deductions that were equipped with a poor compass—for example: scales for grading compositions; non-trans- fer of training; teaching spelling by the method of homonyms; useless- ness of grammar; "teaching in the large." Each was championed by a mighty name; each was heralded as a great new truth; and each was a dismal error. The results of Dr. Freeman's researches will fall on deaf ears if his inquiries are made only in laboratories or special test classes. A large part of his investi- gations must be elsewhere, must be concerned with quite other data. He must gather facts from actuj classrooms that exist if I may i speak, in a state of nature. If h gathers artificial observations, if 1 deduces from unnatural data, h will be merely "thinking," in th Oslerian sense, and his findings wi. shortly be trundled to the ash-heat I suppose that is a somewhai peculiar idea. I can imagine that | Dr. Freeman read this sketch h would smile indulgently and won der why teachers are so narrow. 1 he asked why I dared to be so reck less in print, I should relate to hit what a noted psychiatrist once tol< me. He said, speaking deliberate^ and temperately: "In my profes sional life I have had to read a grea many articles by the psychologica investigators. My estimate is tha 99 out of 100 of these men g< astray. How? Because they havj not established a primary control they do not themselves, as a pre liminary to experiment, understanc the material with which they an dealing." The material of pedagogy in anj school subject is subtle, elusive often paradoxical in most astound- ing ways. It cannot be broughi under primary control by a persor, who is outside the facts of class- room experience; it is controllec only by those who have long earned salaries as mere teachers. Only toe well do I know how unreliable prejudiced, and weak any one of uj may be; how unfit to generalize and (Concluded on page 241)