The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

140 The Educational Screen Habit Formation as Effected By the Motion Picture Ernest L. Crandall Director of Lectures and Visual Instruction, New York City Schools. ONE of the favorite whines of the visual instruction skeptics* runs about as follows: "The movies? Oh, yes, they may amuse, they may interest, they may even instruct the children, in the sense of conveying some information, — though it is a question whether the same information may not be as effectively imparted in other ways. As to contributing to the real ends of education, they simply do not and cannot do it. They are not calculated to stimulate thought, to cultivate the reasoning powers, to induce self activity, to promote sound habit formation. The very nature of the movies induces in the pupil an altitude of passivity, a disposition merely to receive what may be imparted with no incentive to weigh and compare and, least of all, to translate into action." One would imagine that the average teacher would possess enough psychology to combat these various assertions. Indeed these critics are very inconsistent. In the main they constitute the same group of persons who deplore the vicious effects, upon children in particular, of the theatrical movies. If their arguments against the movies as a medium of instruction were sound, then the most depraved products of the screen would be so ineffectual as to be quite negligible as a factor in influencing child life. It would be quite bootless to attempt here to refute all these arguments. Let us investigate merely the question of habit formation. I think it will be conceded that this is one of the major ends, if not the chief end, of education. I think -jt must also be conceded that any instrumentality which is notably effective in inducing the formation of bad habits should be capable of application to the formation of good habits. The critics of the movies are constantly asserting that crime, banditry, lawlessness, profligacy, lewdness and all the breed of vicious impulses and practices are distinctly inculcated in youth through the medium of bad motion pictures. Unless it is assumed that the human material upon which we have to work is naturally depraved, then it must follow that the motion picture is also capable of inculcating the virtues of honesty, probity, fair play, clean living and the like. In fact, leaving out every moral aspect, almost any teacher could testify to the effect of the movies upon the imitative instincts of their pupils, if only to the extent of promoting the boys to walk like Charlie Chaplin and the girls to dress like Norma Talmadge. In short, the motion picture is conducive to habit formation. Now it just happens that from the most unexpected source we have received perfectly spontaneous corroborative evidence of this fact. In one of the schools where our curriculum film course in physical training and hygiene had been presented for half of the full semester the principals at midterm conceived the idea of requesting the children to write to the Director expressing their opinion of the pictures they had thus far received in this course. The children were not told what to write or along what lines to draft their communications. A few selected quotations will indicate clearly, I think, that these children quite unconsciously extracted from their film lessons material calculated to produce a profound effect upon their health habits. Take the subject of malaria. One pupil writes : We can prevent this disease by screening