Educational screen & audio-visual guide (c1956-1971])

Japan. P'rance, Germany, Australia, and other countries, the Board inaugurated an unprecedented idea: to "Bring the World to the Child" through the facilities of a "museum on wheels." Actually, growth of such a museum out of the St. Louis World's Fair was a very natural thing. As early as 1901, the Board of Education had purchased a collection of lantern slides which were circulated from the superintendent's office to teachers who requested them to "clear and strengthen" classroom lessons. In the catalog, where sets of slides for loan to schools were listed, Soldan explained: "The lantern slide pictures presented on the screen are to give greater reality to the lessons of the book by appealing to the eye, to imagination and thought. . . . Pictures assist the memory and judgment alike, and convey to the child a clearer and more comprehensive impression of reality than can be done by verbal description alone." The success of the slides, coupled with the stimulating influence of the fair, convinced Soldan and Rathmann that here in 1904 was the opportunity to make additional visual and concrete aids available to teachers and children. Iheir decision to establisli a "pedagogical museum" reflected the educational vision of a community which had pioneered in other fields — the first public school kindergarten in the country and the first public high school west of the .Mississippi. The philosophy behind it, perhaps first recorded in the words of William lorrey Harris, Superintendent of St. Louis schools in 1876, had been clearly formulated long before the Louisiana Purchase Exposition was a dream. An advocate of learning through observation and personal experience, Harris believed strongly in the ability of field trips, pictures, and objects, to bring children an ever-expanding understanding of the world in which they live. He wrote, "The powers of observation are to be strengthened only by teaching a pupil to think upon what he sees." Harris' concept of visual edu A-y CENTER OF TODAY in St. Louis is this modern and well-equipped building at 1517 S. Thcreso Ave. The curriculum laboratory and school library services are also located in the building — fortunately for close working relationships. 164 cation, still a challenge to our time, was perpetuated in the leadership of Rathmann and Soldan. The vision of these educators went beyond a museum where children would come to study, to one which would also go to the children. As Rathmann pointed out, it would contain nothing "which cannot be used in direct connection with the work of the school." It was to be "not a cemetery of bric-a-brac but a nursery of living thought," from which a variety of wellchosen visual materials would go to the classroom to "enliven the study and stimulate the interest and self-activity of children." However, Soldan cautioned that visual aids would not be a panacea for poor teaching when he wrote, "The thousands of objects illustrating every branch in our curriculum will, ;/ properly and extensively used, afford valuable means of making the lessons in the schoolroom more interesting, intelligible and successful." April 11, 1905, became the official birthday of the museum when Dr. Soldan formally announced that the Educational Museum "is now in such a condition that it may be inspected." Quite logically Miss Meissner, already recognized as an inspired teacher and having proved herself an able organizer and artistic planner as well, was placed in charge of the pioneer institution. Both she and Rathmann were agreed that unless the museum could "make possible in the schoolroom the use of just the illustration that is wanted, just when it is wanted," it would fall short of its obligations to teachers and pupils. To make weekly deliveries to every school, the Board acquired a horse. Old Dan, and an enclosed wagon and appointed a young driver, named Charlie Magoon. In spite of mishaps — the wagon was occasionally mired in mud and once blown over by a strong wind — Old Dan hauled 5,000 visual materials to schools during the school year beginning in September, 1905. (In contrast, modern trucks in St. Louis delivered 394,551 teaching aids in the past school year.) The years that followed the fair were carefully documented with characteristic foresight by Miss Meissner in a comprehensive series of pictures forming a chronologic history of the museum and showing many early pedagogic practices. There are pictures of staff' members at work in the audiovisual center's various homes — it has had seven — and of the electric trucks that succeeded Old Dan; of a class using stereoscopic \iews, the 3-D of an early day; and of children and teacher in the high button shoe and bowler hat era on a field trip to a Mississippi River bluff. Educational Screen