The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

October, 1940 MOTION PICTURES— NOT FOR THEATRES By ARTHUR EDWIN KROWS Page 333 Installment Twenty—mainly concern- ing Harley Clarke and the interest- ing events leading to establishment of the Society for Visual Education NEXT, in February. 1920. at Cleve- land. Ohio, forty-odd delegates to the annual meeting of the Na- tional Education Association Depart- ment of Superintendence proposed, and presently started, the National Academy of Visual Instruction, the purposes stated to include promotion of non-flam film, distribution of suitable reels, organization of State associations, improvement of subject matter, establishment of stand- ards, and conduct of tests. Belatedly, but still important to the record, in the spring of 1922 the Visual Instruction Association of .America ap- peared in New York City under the presidency of Dr. Ernest L. Crandall, director of lectures and visual instruc- tion in the local schools. To simplify one's view of this com- plicated picture, the chronology may be advanced temporarily and sufficiently to note that in June. 1924, at a Washing- ton convention, Ernest Crandall was made superintendent of the Department of Visual Instruction of the National Education .Association, that about 1931 the Visual Instruction As,sociation of .America voted to become a branch of the National .Academy of Visual Instruc- tion and that, appro.ximately a year later, both of these were absorbed by the visual education branch of the N. E. A. For further clarity, one may think of the interested educators as being in just two large groups centering respect- ively in New York and Chicago, these cities being engaged, as usual, in friendly rivalry for leadership. In the New York Visual Instruction Association of .America one found, in addition to Dr. Crandall, A. G. Balcom. assistant superintendent of schools at Newark, K. J.; George Zehrung, direc- tor of the Y.M.C.A. Motion Picture Bureau; Rowland Rogers, former editor of the "Pictograph" and soon to become instructor in motion picture production at Columbia University; Rita Hochheim- ' er, assistant to Crandall; Dr. Ilsley Boone; Don Carlos Ellis, former direc- tor of the motion picture division of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and at this time associated in a New York non- theatrical distributing project with Harry Levey; and Dr. Clyde Fisher, of the American Museum of Natural History. Lending powerful moral support on the executive board were the formidable names of John H. Finley and George D. Strayer. The active representation thus was almost wholly within the nn^tropolitan area; the Chicago body, on the other hand, attracted members from the en- tire Lake Country and all the Midwest, everyone concerned eager to assist in the fascinating new development. The National Academy of Visual Instruction, having been initiated in the pleasant "Forest City" of Ohio, was headed fit- tingly by W. M. Gregory, curator of the Educational Museum of the Cleve- land School of Education. Notable among the names of his .Academy asso- ciates were J. V. Ankeney, then associ- ate professor of visual education at the University of Missouri, Dudley Grant Hays, of the Chicago Public Schools; and William H. Dudley, chief of the bu- reau of visual instruction at the Uni- versity of Wisconsin since about 1917. Dudley, Gregory and .Ankeney had serv- ed on the committee to make school films of the "Ford Educational Week- ly" just the preceding summer. There were also many important names in the original roster of the commercially founded Society for Visual Education, but they were mostly of educators who were sympathetic towards the movement without specializing in it; and the casual reader of today catches soonest there at the modest mentions of Harley Clarke and Nelson L. Greene. As it is not to be supposed that the visual education movement sprang into being at the behest of the founders of these various groups with the classical suddenness of Pallas .Athenae bursting from the head of Jove, one may inquire profitably into the isolated, earlier ac- tivities of these "visual educators" who here appeared so unexpectedly upon the pedagogical firmament. Those who were to be seen then most conspicuously, by their works as by their declarations, numbered just about as many as one might count upon his fingers. Besides Gregory of Cleveland, Dudley of Madi- son and Hays of Chicago, there were Charles Roach, of Iowa State College at Ames, where J. Will Parry had had a motion picture department as early as 1914; A. G. Balcom, superintendent of schools at Newark, N. J., who in later years was to acquire the soubriquet "dean of visual education"; John A. Hollinger, of the Pittsburgh school sys- tem, an especially earnest, vigorous and original investigator; Joseph Whitefield Scroggs, director of the extension di- vision of the University of Oklahoma; George E. Condra. director of the Ne- braska Geological Survey, at Lincoln; Crosby of North Carolina, and Freder- ick W. Reynolds of the extension divi- sion of the University of Utah. Many other names were presently to come forward and acquire significance, too; and there were some whose own- ers expected to become important in the field but were doomed to disappoint- ment. Life is like that. However, in the rosy promise of this dawning third decade of the century, one may be optimistic and think just of those who made good. At about this time F. Dean McQusky, a graduate student of the University of Chicago, with an interest in films backed by a sixteen months' overseas exper- ience with the photographic division of the U. S. Army Air Service returned to his alma mater to hear Frank N. Free- man, newly made professor of psychol- ogy there, recommend researches in this new field of visual education. McClusky's enthusiasm kindled, he was to gain ce- lebrity even as a pioneer—and so as it happened was Professor Freeman, him- self. Joseph J. Weber was disentangling local film problems at the University of Arkansas, Andrew P. Hollis, likewise, was studying the matter in an extension project at North Dakota Agricultural College. E. R. Enlow was making un- official surveys preliminary to succeeding Joseph Coffman as director of visual instruction in the Atlanta Public Schools. Charles G. Hoban was starting the bent which was to make him, in a few years more, the director of visual education for the State of Pennsylvania, and take him thence to a well-financed develop- ment of the kind at Duke University, or, as one not too particular might say, in the heart of the tobacco duchy. The agricultural colleges were the likeliest places for visual education to start flourishing without artificial stim- ulus, for the farmer always had lived preeminently by the visual method, out- door scenes were comparatively inex- pensive to shoot, a wealth of subject matter was to be had for the asking, the national tradition of the importance of agriculture had led the Government it- self to produce numerous motion pic- tures dealing with the line and distrib- ute them gratis, and also, the shows ar- ranged for the students had a double value when sent forth to tillers of the soil in popular audience groups over the surrounding country. It is no deprecation of the splendid pioneer work of William H. Dudley that he had the advantage of such a situa- tion at the University of Wisconsin. No more should his reputation be less- ened because he had the unique oppor- tunity' of serving under Louis Ehrhart Reber, the distinguished engineer who had been dean of the extension division of the University since 1907. It was Dean Reber who received passing com- pliments in an Edison Outlook interview in the summer of 1914, for having given