We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
— 33i —
different from plays and also from music, which like the film is still knocking for admission at the school door. And if such films are as yet few in number, let us in justice admit that the supply of plays suitable for serious school study is also not inexhaustible.
Here then — among these film-classics, as we will call them — lies work for the school cinema as a mass-undertaking, though there is nothing to prevent these films being used also for direct class-teaching. I fear, however, that in this case — when the wave of educational reform has perhaps momentarily spent itself — the old anatomical method of treating plays in the class-room will be succeeded by the vivisection of films — the enumeration of scenes and checking of gestures, accompanied by the weaving of aesthetic theories and blackboard exercises in cinematography and — needless to say — our old friend essay-writing. If there is any danger of this, it would be better that such films should be reserved for larger gatherings. Their aim is pleasure, the development of sensibility, enjoyment, if you will. If we can educate children to a critical enjoyment of motion pictures — proceeding with due care for the children's minds and sternly rejecting unsuitable films — our work will have a definite and quite useful purpose. We cannot provide our children with a better equipment than a strong dislike for the inferior and the commonplace even in this sphere.
To be sure, this road will not end in the teachingfilm. If proper use is to be made of this, it is essential to abandon all idea of the film as a thing apart. Among teaching material films are no more singular or exceptional than globes or maps or coloured chalks. The sooner this mental reservation in face of the new method disappears, the better for the method. The difficulties of technique, the commercial and scientific, that is, the operating obstacles still to be overcome, also the fire-proof and building requirements imposed by the police — all these are either passing phases or things which in the physics and chemical laboratories have in other spheres become matters of everyday experience, now that the era of blackboard physics is past. Whether every school should have a special projection room or every class have facilities for film-teaching are minor questions; the point is that all schools should be able to conduct class-teaching by lantern-slide and film. It would be asking too much of many schools that every class-room should be fitted up for film-teaching. As regards lantern-slide instruction, the suggestion is more feasible, in spite of the alleged danger that time would then be spent in turning the magic lantern instead of using lantern-slides for some specific lesson. Incidentally, I have no great fear of this.
We will suppose then that filmteaching is in every school a technical possibility. Also we shall have no objection to a colleague seriously concerning himself with this instruction, even if he himself does not conduct it. There is plenty of unassuming talent which, although it does not seek the limelight, could be of the greatest help to us, if we only cared to employ it.