Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

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44 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 9 other publications. In 1941 The Reader’s Digest sponsored the recording by Mutual Broadcasting Company of a demonstration in the utilization of magazines in the classroom, as done by a Lewis-trained group. Herewith are presented photos of typical activities of Lewis’s photoplay club, which has done serious production work in the amateur field. The club has made films on shop techniques, puppetry, library work, and scenes from classics. In 1939 the club won first place in a national contest sponsored by the Board of Review with a film on Reaching for Knoivledge, which has since been used in many schools. The Enlarging Concept of the Motion Picture as an Instructional Aid BY ROBERT E. SCHREIBER Department of Educotion, University of Chicago, and Consultant on Visual Education, Stephens College. I. Introduction Today, as the smoke of battle clears, revealing the crucial issues of a world at peace, educators in many quarters are reevaluating their curricula and instruction to the end that society, long suffering from an inadequate social technology with which to solve its timeless and perplexing problems, may look with new hope to the agency which now must play its greatest role: the school. Educators everywhere, viewing with mixed emotions the generally effective life-or-death instruction of the armed forces, are wondering if, with greater use of the motionpicture medium, they, too, may achieve for their pupils comparably efficient learnings under the motivations of peace. II. The Silent Motion Picture Arrives Problems of the Motion Picture in Education : The motion picture in education has had a short but hectic history in the annals of instructional usage. Short, if twenty years may thus be termed ; hectic, if the evolution of the edu cational film may be considered in the light of the forces that made it what it was before and continue to determine its development today. Unlike the theatrical motion picture, whose progenitors have had to contend only with rather broad swings in popular fancy, the classroom film has continually been caught in a three-way stretch among the producers, the teaching profession as a guiding force, and the demands of the educational market. The educational market for motion pictures has ever been a bleakly fickle proposition ; one that most producers, seeking the almighty dollar as much as the market abhorred it, have learned to steer clear of — or dine on thin soup indeed. Unwitting supervisor of the development of the motion picture for instructional usage has been the teaching profession ; “unwitting” because one would hesitate to say that good judgment has highlighted the role of the profession in bringing the world into the classroom. Unfamiliar with the techniques and costs of motion-picture production and ever fearful of fostering the appearance of instructional mechanization in the classrooms of the nation, the profession has vacillated in its directions to the producers with perhaps forgivable naivete. Early Concepts of the Role of the Instructional Motion Picture: When the infant motion picture first came out of the West and was harnessed by slender threads to the curriculum, a film for specific educational usage had yet to be conceived. Enterprising educators used the cinema as it was, and in the early years paid scant attention to the ideology under whose aegis their new learning tool had been created. The ideology of the theatrical film is, and always has been, primarily the science of entertainment ideas, while that of the instructional film must necessarily be the science of instructional ideas. The ideas used in the development of a screen presentation of subject-matter must instruct first. Entertainment may enter in during the process of instructing, but what