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— the result of an unsystematic mania for the accumulation of facts. Nuremberg having failed to give us the last item of information about municipal life in the middle ages, we are bidden to look at views of Rothenburg and Dinkelsbiihl, Frankfurt a. Main and Windsheim, with a bit of Hans Sachs, the Mastersingers and Baron von Monchhausen thrown in. We boys made the only protest we could against all this collection of dry-as-dust matter — we slept.
Once we have had practice in absorbing film-matter and learnt how to pick it up quickly, then will be the time to start film-teaching. The motion picture melody is not composed of a single note. It embraces the whole gamut; the subject is embroidered with so many secondary motifs that it is easy, especially for children to lose sight of the main theme. For instance, suppose we film the linnet feeding her young; after a space the camera-man's eye is caught by the swaying of the branch in the breeze, which he thinks worth a " shot "; just then a fat worm comes out of the ground and the bird is off. Connection is lost. The attention is diverted and an element of educational value sacrificed, whether the operator goes on turning or not. But if the film is frequently stopped and the children are made to correct their impressions, their attention occasionally roused by being deliberately misled, we may be certain then that they will take good care not to allow any room for doubt about their attentiveness and interest. As a young teacher, I often rejoiced at the lively discussion and bubbling enthusiasm which these methods evoked.
One of the first maxims of these lessons in seeing should be to avoid beginning at once with any writing work. Better to have a further spell of description and comment, to run off again some scene that has not been understood (by the reversing process) and to encourage talk about the film, even between the pupils themselves; above all, let us avoid the laborious system of questions. We shall soon notice a freshness in the air. Let ink give way to chalk and exercise-books to blackboards. It's a pity that teachers cannot, draw better. A drawing, for instance, of a starling is improved a hundredfold if we can show its wings flapping and its beak opening and shutting. Nor could there be any more lively competition than a collective drawing effort by teacher and pupil, signed " Who saw most? " The teacher should not prize his superiority too highly. Tommy's little victory over teacher is educationally worth more than the elaborately prepared blackboard picture by the demonstrator. At the best we teachers are only stage-producers and should encourage the whole cast to play their parts for what they are worth.
I do not mean that later on, when utilising the results of film-projection, drawing is not perhaps the best method to employ, but only that film-teaching suffers from a too sparing use of chalk, as indeed of other aids to teaching
— slides, maps, etc., and, of course, practical experiments and outdoor work. Much too little attention is paid to the possibilities of using these