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

editorial One Hundred Hearings by Paul C Reed with gratitude and appreciation to K. T. Wu, Chinese Section, Library of Congress. The last time we discussed Chinese proverbs editorially it touched off a series of claims and counter claims as to who it reaJly was who did say that a picture was worth a hundred words, or a thousand, or whether it was ever said at all. In that October, 1948, editorial ( page 382 ) we quoted the proverb as "ONE PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS," and commented simply that the saying was misleading. It kept people from thinking. The point we were trying to make was that in spite of the Chinese words, words are of supreme importance. Pictures can only help to make words more meaningful. The thing that really matters is the way we use pictures. From Evanston came a letter shouting we shouldn't have blamed the Chinese. The proverb wasn't ancient. It had been invented by a Madison Avenue advertising man in 1927. A Ph. D. from California then put the record straight (so he thought) by actually tracing the Chinese characters that spelled out "ONE SEEING IS WORTH A HUNDRED TELLINGS." Emphatically he stated it was Chinese, and ancient, too. We erred when we printed the Chinese characters horizontally! Anyway, the proverb persists in a hundred varying ways. Hardly a month goes by but we find it quoted in an article submitted for pubhcation. We see it in the ads for new pictures and audiovisual equipment. Every suffering teacher of an audiovisual course tells of seeing the saying in a dozen term papers every semester. Always it's written in words; never in pictures! So, early in this New Year, the first of a new decade, we decided it would be a distinctive and worthwhile public service to put the record straight, finally and once and for all. These words are being published for permanent reference and for posterity. They should hang on the walls or decorate the files of every audiovisual ad writing agency, every audiovisual dealer or director, every teacher of an AV course and the editors of AV journals and books. Last but not least, these words should be heeded by every person who someday is going to write his first term paper or article about the values of audiovisual materials for instruction. First, the proverb isn't about words or pictures at all. It's about "hearings" and "seeings." We won't attempt to reproduce the Chinese characters because they do not fit our horizontal style. But well romanize them as follows: Po wen pu ju i chien Literally translated this says 100 HEARINGS NOT EQUAL ONE SEEING It may be more freely translated thus: To hear about a thing one hundred times is not so good as seeing it once. These often misquoted words appear for the first time, so f£ir as we or our learned informant knows, in the biography of Chao Ch'ungkuo in chiian (that means, roughly, chapter) 69 of the Han-shu. Han-shu is a history of the fonner Han dynasty (B.C. 206— A.D. 24). It was written by Pan Ku ( A.D. 32-92 ) . There are dozens of editions of this work, but if you need a specific page and line reference, you can cite it this way: Pan, Ku. Han-shu. K'ai-ming Erh-shih-wu shih edition (1935), 69/0531.2. That last cryptic number means you can read the quote for yourself in column number 2, on page 0531, in chapter (chiian) 69. Educational Screen and Audiovisual Guide — February, 1961 67