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There is a school in every neighbourhood, and it can be reached without much trouble or time; a people's university is a fixture in the city not so easily accessible to those living in outlying districts. Regular educational film shows will, in my opinion, do much to promote closer contact between the school and the home. Half-yearly or yearly parents' evenings or monthly parents' meetings may be both useful and necessary, but the parents will learn more and remember more from interesting filmshows than from schoolmasterly lectures and advice.
Let us, however, return to our muttons. Apart from regular cinema performances at the end of the school day or outside school hours, how can cinematography be suitably incorporated in the curriculum?
The foregoing will have made it clear that this is a difficult question to answer. Until the film industry is able to supply educational films that can be made an organic part of the school syllabus, the problem of rationalised teaching will never be successfully solved. And this, despite the positive achievements of individual men and women teachers. These are isolated results, the fruit of long years of special effort.
There is therefore no choice but to take cinematography as it exists and to realise that in its present stage of development the educational film can find only a restricted use within the school syllabus.
Not so with the epidiascope. The epidiascope, as we know, can project upon the screen objects both transparent and opaque, but, although many teachers are aware of this invaluable property, only a few schools fully avail themselves of its possibilities. Yet, if properly employed and subject to a suitable collection of material, the epidiascope could partially solve the problem of rationalising education. The ideal will continue to be the teachingfilm duly adapted to the type of school and the subject of tuition, but as a halfway house and an auxiliary the epidiascope can do excellent work and, even if in the future the ideal becomes a reality, the epidiascope will remain a useful supplement to the cinematograph.
Film makers in Germany tell me that the initiative in the further production of educational films must proceed from teachers and school boards. The factory has to calculate before it can manufacture; it must know what the demand is likely to be. Experiments on a large scale are costly and the film industry cannot afford to run the risk unless it can count upon the support of the teaching profession.
The epidiascope is a good means of providing a temporary basis upon which the film industry can build and start to develop the ideal teachingfilms of the future.
As already stated, the teacher is not alone to blame if the virtues of school cinematography are insufficiently recognized. Anyone who knows how difficult it is to obtain suitable films and especially the obstacles that arise if the teacher fails to arrange for systematic film-cycles for the different subjects, will agree that the teacher at present has no choice. The organ