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.
— 332 —
What we shall object to is the demand from outside — based on economic and interested motives — that film-teaching shall be compulsory. It is a tavourite cry — not of the film industry itself, but of certain hangers-on of educational cinematography — that the State should prescribe the use of films in all teaching or at any rate the employment of all existing films. We teachers can appreciate the motive behind this wish, but it is impracticable. There is no one and only applicable method, and teaching by film would be the first teaching method to be laid down by order. We film workers should probably be the first to protest against such compulsion and we should be bound to do so, if we had any sense of honesty. To those who have for so long been tentatively experimenting, it is essential that their educational film work should be the spontaneous expression of their own convictions. For us regular film-teaching must on no account mean compulsory film teaching. This system, advocated in interested quarters, of ration-tickets and bread-cards would incur general odium.
It is quite likely that, if they are left free, the best friends and keenest supporters of educational films will be the most sparing in their use. For the aim should be not to make a class-film of everything that has a possible film value, but to utilise good films in such a way that they give their maximum yield. Films must be used not only to add to a pupil's knowledge, but to train his faculties.
Psychologists are for ever telling us that we do not know how to look at things. Still less is our capacity for quick apprehension. That this is a matter of practice we have been learning from Pelman for years. Without Pelman, however, and other exercises by correspondence, we could learn both to see and to apprehend from the cinema and must indeed do so before deriving any benefit from films. It is precisely this that hinders the progress of film-teaching to-day.
To begin with, we ourselves do not know how to look at films, and nor do the children. Accordingly, they need first to be taught how to take in the contents of a picture. Not after the manner of Holzel's wallpictures of the seasons in three or four languages, those pictures about which the children are asked the same eternal questions, knowing perfectly well that they need not attend, because the picture will still be hanging there to-morrow, a week later and after the summer holidays. They know in fact that the little girl with the straw-hat is more likely to fall into the water among the ducks than they are to have done with that picture before the end of term. And even then they are only quit of the German version; the whole boring business starts again in English and French. Pictureteaching is surely the dreariest form of instruction, at any rate after the third lesson. Nothing new to look at, talk about or delight in; nothing but grammatical exercises and practice in composition. We have learnt to hate these pictures in several tongues and not " The Seasons " only, but all those pictures used in natural science, engineering and cultural history