The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

Uciobcr, 1923 Visual Instruction Association of America 390 films in New York schools come from forty-one different sources and include producers of the purely commercial type not members of any visual education association. As to inherent profit. So far, this is a joke. The producers of educational films are not making ^money enough to bribe or influence anyone. There is no market for their goods in the commercial picture house. Boards of education are not yet appropriating money enough to make percentages of profit so attractive as to induce commercial producers to go into that field. The number of films possible of inclusion as visual education is as yet so small and the demand even for those available is as yet so slight that no opportunity yet exists for profit considerable enough to afford temptation. Forewarned is forearmed. With this we can dismiss the danger, as well as the suspicion, of commercialism. The second division of my subject brings up the relation of the training of children to the moving picture now most frequently shown in houses run for commercial profit. Here I speak as a practical teacher, who keeps informed in what is occupying the minds of the children in her class. From this point of view the commercial moving picture is doing several things to our children, and most of them harmful. Last fall Dr. Ettinger, our superintendent in New York, made an address which he called "Facing the Facts." It compelled us to look squarely in the face the matter of the progress children are making through the grades and the relation of our course of study to that progress. It has brought a complete change of the point of view of many teachers regarding both questions. Similarly let us face the facts regarding the moving picture and its influence on our children. Hitherto most teachers have spent their time inveighing against the evil of moving pictures. Let us face the fact that the moving picture is here to stay, like the theatre. As a child and young girl I was forbidden to go to the theatre and was taught to believe it was a sinful thing to do. The first time I went was in secret disobedience to orders. I found out it was good, a means of making my difficult study of Shakespeare alive and interesting and remembered. I lost respect for the judgment of those who had told me it was all wrong and sinful. Likewise, inveighing against the evils of moving pictures will never keep children away from them and only builds up a barrier between us and them. Let us face the fact that the moving picture is an unremovable factor in children's lives and consider wherein it is evil and wherein it is good. Its evil influences are serious disturbances to the teacher's work and to the training of character. The most important are: 1. The moving picture makes too strong an appeal to the imagination, because it wakes tip and stirs imagination without giving it proper direction or training. 2. It makes explicit much which should be left to imagination and for many chil'dren never known and better never known. It is one thing for a boy to read about jimmying a lock open, but quite another thing for a moving picture to show him how to do it and induce him to try his hand at it. 3. It is a temptation to superficiality and satisfaction with disconnected bits of knowledge instead of thoroughness, organized knowledge, and organized habits of thinking. 4. Young children are permitted, and even tempted, to attend moving picture shows at night, as is seldom the case with the theatre. The loss of sleep and the distraction to their studies makes the. child unfit for school. At the same time the commercial moving picture has brought about three results for good, which teachers fail to realize or to benefit by. One is that the moving picture gives knowledge and information not otherwise obtainable by the average child in public schools. The child in the large city learns what a wheat field is and the country child learns the difference between a paved street and a shady lane. Second, the moving picture does arouse interest in subjects of knowledge otherwise closed books to those same children, no matter how pedagogically thorough the teacher's work may be. A notable illustration of this is the impetus given to geography by the travelogues and news weeklies of the big motion picture houses. The third result which makes its special appeal to me is that the moving picture has provided a victorious rival for the corner gang, the pool room, the street battles, and the "Fagins"— which influences used to provide most of the candidates for admission among my delinquents, much worse problems than any we have today. Facing the facts about the moving pictures brings us logically to the third division of our subject: How can teachers aid in solving the problems precipitated by the moving pictures? First, let us bring the moving picture into the