The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

September, 1944 Page 295 two per cent of the lifetime of an average person in this country is spent in formal schoolroom education. As a rule study stops when we leave school. From then on most of us learn only from what we hear on the radio, or what we read in the headlines, or the funny-papers. If democracy is to work we just have to stir up our people some way to keep on learning about the problems that face us, locally, nationally and internationally. As I see it, the one medium that will help most in this direction is the visual aids program, and particularly the adult motion picture. We cannot depend on just teaching the children what to know to be good citizens. By the time they are old enough to vote much of what they have learned may already be no longer so. This is a fast moving world. When war came we had to get vital information to the adult population of our country, and we had to do it in a hurry. The multitude of problems raised by the war could best be presented to the whole people, it seemed to us, by means of 16nini motion pictures. Through this medium, long tested and proved in our schools, we could show the masses of our people why we fight — and how we fight. We could show home problems and world problems, the nature of our foes, the war role of every civilian and of every soldier, and the relations between all these various fronts and factors. Many motion pictures were produced, some suitable, and some mighty poor, but we took them and began to use them all over this country. Wherever people met for serious community purposes, motion picture projectors were put to work, films were shown. Films of the type and purpose of the last one shown here — and if you observed the rapt attention here you can visualize the way the films did their job throughout the country. Where we want to impart information — and be sure of understanding of that information— in our adult population, in a hurry, the motion picture will do it. The Chairman: The purpose of community showing of inspirational films is to stimulate thinking. It can be a diversity of thinking, if need be, just so it stimulates public-spirited interest and co-operative action for the winning of the war. This is not so in strict Army indoctrination films. But in the British forces, on the other hand, this same type of free-and-easy discussion of controversial current events is purposefully encouraged, on the old Cromwellian theory that the best soldier is he who knows and loves that for which he fights. To the best of my knowledge that has not yet been done in the American armed forces. The Chairman: On the matter of civilian training for war work, we have on our panel a real authority. Probably the world's best skill-training program by means of visual aids has been conducted under his direct charge, by the War Training Aids Division of the United States Office of Education. Noel: Before Mr. Brooker speaks, I just want to observe that we are all out to see what can be accomplished with skill-training films. Arnspiger: Another thing I would like to say is that we have learned very definitely from the Army and Navy how to integrate the various types of visual aids — films, slides, printed materials. It seems we have a better insight as a result of the war training experience. Brooker: In April, 1941, the U. S. Office of Education started to make training films. In June of that year I was kicked out of one of the biggest shipyards, and the cameras came out with us; they would not allow us to take any pictures. In September of that year the head of one of the divisions of a major government agency said that this was one of the craziest things he ever heard of in the realm of education. I could go on and on with stories of this kind. But by November of that year, a month before Pearl Harbor, we had 18 films on the market and now, as of today, we have 147 films out in use and 350 more in production. They range all the way from how to paint a mower to taking apart stabilizers, from the operation of large smelters to the use of a drill bar — in fact, they cover the whole gamut of the use of tools and materials essential to the winning of the war. There are 30,000 prints out now, and they will continue at the rate of 10,000 a year. We have used enough film, 16mm andSSmm, to go from here to Hawaii. We have made millions of slides, many of good quality and many not so good. But when you consider, that there are 20,000 school districts in this country, with about 87,000 school buildings and that we have supplied 7,000 or 8,000 with our materials, you will agree we have so far supplied only a drop in the bucket. We were kicked out of one shipyard. But I have a letter from another yard which tells us that our 10 films on shipbuilding alone are the equivalent of 400 men. Maybe this is exaggerating a little, but one of the training directors faced with the job of building ships with men still green from the corn and cotton fields, said that "In January 1941 we had 40,000 men in the whole country employed in shipbuilding, whereas two years later we had a count of 685,000." Where do you suppose these 645,000 additional men came from ? They had never seen a shipyard before, yet here they were building ships. Every month about 70,000 men are being released by our armed forces. They are not released because the war is over; they are out because it is over so far as they are concerned. They are handicapped. I wonder if that has any implication at all for public education. A second point — I am sure that we are all amazed at how much geography you have to learn from the war communiques. I once taught geography, but I am learning all sorts of things that I had never seen in the books I had at school. I can tell you all about Bucepheles, the horse that Alexander the Great rode, and about the temple designs of Carthage and Luxor. But I cannot tell you much about the history of China, of Burma, or India, the 18th century trend of history in Germany, or the tendencies of the Iraq government. Could our education, I wonder, be at fault? The war itself is a wonderful challenge to education — and we face still bigger problems at the end of the war. Education is going to have to change — in some direction — and we will have to learn which and how, somehow. Noel: I stand squarely behind my earlier statement that there was very little new in what Army and Navy have done in developing films that American educators have not done before. Specifically, for instance, the USOE proceeded in the development of the training films that Mr. Brooker heads up, by translation of information into forms that facilitate the development of skills. And they did this before the army-navy training program came into being. Here and there across the far reaches of our continent there were educational people of vision who, in their small way, were doing some of these things. Some of these people at least are in the armed forces. The Army and Navy had a job for these educators to do, but even so, results had to demonstrate value. But now it has been begun, and has been put into effect on a broad scale. In civilian education, too, we are challenged by a job to do. What is American education going to do about it? We are not spending even one cent per pupil per year in using these aids. Does American education have the leadership, the courage to go back to its patrons, the taxpayers, the