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instruments in combination with one another. Colour postcards have, it is true, been episcopically projected to produce the proper mood for appreciating a poem. But which of us is in the habit of showing his own or someone else's slides and photographs to illustrate the German lesson, for instance? At most, the few travellers who have brought back with them their own pictures. It should be an understood thing that nature-study parties, etc., should bring back good, clear photographs of what they have seen, to be shown to one another years later perhaps. Such exceptions are possibly to be found here and there, but they are nowhere as yet part and parcel of school equipment. Diaries or family snapshot albums are not enough; we must have permanent hooks upon which to hang remembered experiences and sensations. When maps and blackboard-drawings and the school work in general supplement the contents of a slide, when the exception becomes the rule and experience joins hands with understanding, no one will any longer be able to say that it is the picture which educates. It may be the chalk or what the teacher is able to suggest by or extract from the picture. If the latter supplies the impulse, it will have done its share.
The same, of course, applies, possibly with even more force, to the film, the living picture. But let us beware of film dogma and be careful not to abolish the other methods and aids, least of all, the expression of views by the children themselves.
All of us, especially we grown-ups, have become too abstract, so much so, indeed, that we no longer see clearly and therefore cannot transmit clearly. If we want a chair mended, or some small change made in the house, many of us cannot express our wishes. The workman has to find them out and tell us, whereupon we nod our heads and are glad to be " understood ". But we've not been understood; our meaning has merely been guessed. The man is to be envied who can draw what he wants to say. This example, however, illustrates a daily occurrence, due to vagueness, inability to see clearly, imperfect conceptions. As a result, we stammer instead of speaking, we fail to understand or we misunderstand; a gulf spreads between the young and the old, the educated and the uneducated, the brain-worker and the operative.
Our passion for abstractions, the powers of abstract thinking we pride ourselves on, our search for " general principles " have deprived us of the faculty of sight, and especially of insight.
If stationary pictures and still more moving pictures can teach us to acquire or to regain our powers of sight so that we can reproduce what is shown to us and thus find our way back from the abstract to the concrete, the teaching film will have fulfilled its highest purpose. This indeed I hold to be the ultimate aim of film-teaching in schools: Not merely to make teaching more objective and thorough, more vivid and concrete, but to bring us into closer touch with life itself, making us simpler and by so much the more intelligible to one another.