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STUDIES AND ENQUIRIES
THE CINEMA AND CHILDREN.
All those who are concerned with the study of social problems are unanimous in regarding the question of the influence of the screen on the minds and education of children and young people as the most crucial of all the questions connected with the cinematograph. All other cinema problems are more or less remotely dependent on this. The one essential question is whether the cinema is a blessing or a curse ; whether or not it may exercise on the exquisitely delicate and personal sensibility of the child an influence that goes beyond those normal reflexes of sensation and emotivity that are harmless to the unfledged spirit.
The International Educational Cinematographic Institute, ever since the publication of the first number of its Review, has stressed the need of an enquiry embracing all problems connected with the film in its influence on the young. Apart from articles of a purely theoretic character, such as those by Aloysio de Vincente, Henry Carton de Wiart, Alberto Lutrario, and Luis A. Baralt, we may recall the special studies made by Giulio Santini and Hans Curbs, which formulated theories of a strictly didactic tenour; that of Maurice Rouvroy, dealing with some psycho-pathological problems of the cinema; Thomas E. Finegan's and Andre de Maday's enquiries ; « A Discussion of Motion Pictures in their relation to Children and Education)), which appeared in our issue of September 1929, and « Crime and the Cinema in the United States)) published in the same number, and which weighed the pros and cons of the two opposite viewpoints as to whether the cinema can or cannot be regarded as a school of criminality and corruption for adults and children. This latter article aroused the liveliest controversy in all countries.
Viewed in the light of the theoretical and pracdcal studies that have appeared in the Review and of the enquiries which the Institute is carrying out in pursuance of the resolution passed in Geneva in April 1929 by the Committee on Child Welfare, this problem appears to present two different aspects — one purely didactic and one social.
As a matter of fact, these two aspects, if they do not actually merge into one, have many points in common. The principal aim of the science of teaching is to find out how the child can derive the fullest measure of knowledge from the lessons taught him and grasp and understand their inner meaning with the greatest ease. Thus teaching is ever in quest of new means that may efficaciously help in the noble task of moulding the young mind. And in the pursuit of its immediate and remoter aims, teaching necessarily fulfils an essentially social mission. The child who enters upon life well prepared by a healthy and modern system of education is at once in a privileged position and better able to defend himself against the social perils that beset his path. Knowledge spell? the power to reason and the