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B. The Purpose of Educational Cinematography.
The question whether educational cinematography really has a purpose is one that unfortunately still demands an answer. Daily conversation still reveals doubting Thomases, others not infrequently ask to be explained all this fuss about educational films, while the press, the censorship, some conspicuous failure, or amateur enthusiasts among themselves, sometimes raise the question of the value of the work. It is perhaps not altogether a bad thing that our new task — let us avoid the seriously overworked word " movement " — should be called in question and compelled again and again to take stock of its real meaning, its purpose, its ways and means. If workers put these questions to themselves and honestly seek an answer to them, it can only be to the good of the cause. At the present time, to be sure, economic circumstances give the discussion an especially lively turn.
Neither hostility nor enthusiasm for the school cinema can affect our particular method of teaching by film. Both have assumed exaggerated forms and have on that account often proved shortlived. That violent hostility which foretold the time when every school and every class would have its own mechanical soul-killer, when children would be cut off from real life and fed on potted culture and canned experience; or again that hostility clothed in irony or sarcasm which consigned all educationists who believed in or worked for educational cinematography, to America or recommended that they should become commercial travellers in cultural films; these forms of animosity have helped nobody. They have not improved a single film and have not enriched or impoverished any organisation; they have simply supplied catchwords for those who in conversation are accustomed to use catchwords as brickbats; at the worst they have served to discourage a few potential helpers.
On the other hand, those ultra-enthusiasts for the cinema who said in 1911 that all popular education would shortly be by film and led Edison to dream of books, newspapers and teaching matter being all replaced by the cinema, while Lemke spoke of " reforming education through science " under the pre-war impression that the way of school reform lay through the simultaneous use of gramophone and film — all this enthusiasm has not helped to advance the cause it had at heart. The enthusiasts were blind to the one fundamental fact that what you want done, you must do yourself. Their love stopped short of that. Such enthusiasts are apt to take refuge behind the State, which is expected to realise (and to finance) their ambitions and to do the work of its own citizens. All this enthusiasm found vent in books and newspaper articles on educational films, in speeches and majority decisions, in programmes and manifestoes, even in plans and sketches, but it did not result in a single concrete creation for the purpose of practising what had been so loudly preached.
Not that the problem of educational films can be solved without enthu