International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1934)

164 THE CINEMA IN EDUCATION THE EDUCATIONAL INFLUENCE OF THE CINEMA ON JUVENILE CRIMINALS AND DEGENERATES By Professor Benigno Di Tullio, of the University of Rome. The continual progress that is being made in the practical application of the educational cinema is of considerable interest in a special branch of education which is of the highest importance to every civilized country, namely, the re-education of juvenile criminals and young people who have gone astray. If the cinema is a great educational means for children, generally speaking, as everybody now agrees, it is obvious that it must necessarily be successful also in this serious problem of re-educating children of evil tendencies. It is unanimously acknowledged that the cinema is of special importance for pedagogical purposes because it helps children to gain instruction and education much more easily and with less fatigue by the sovereign method of observation and enjoyment. By enormously facilitating perception and therefore increasing the faculties of assimilation and fixation, the cinema helps the child to remember better, to understand more exactly, and especially to direct its mental activities to a practical, objective knowledge and valuation of reality, and at the same time restrains the continuous and at times dangerous work of the imaginative faculties. If this quality of the cinema is of great value to so-called normal children, it is of even greater value to those who come under the heading of delinquents or degenerates. These children are also frequently pseudo or genuine abnormal subjects psychically, and a pedagogic system which is mainly based on observation is even more necessary in their case and is indeed, perhaps, of capital importance. In this connection, it must be remembered that the modern problem of the adaptability of a child to teaching from the psychological point of view must be considered according to different criteria, namely: the physico-morphological (somatic development and physical age) ; the medical the psychological (mental age : reactions to teaching as Q. I) ; the scholastic (reactions as pupil possibility) ; and the pedotechnic (as capacity of undergoing training). (1) This being admitted, it is obvious that the educational cinema may exercise a great influence in the education of juvenile criminals, young people who have gone astray, whether from the psychological point of view, as a means of developing the intelligence for practical purposes, the scholastic point of view, as a means of obtaining the culture necessary for the requirements of social life, or the pedotechnical point of view, as capacity for training ; or, in other words, it may aid the utilisation of the bio-psychic energies of the child . The educational cinema has another field of action which is undoubtedly the most important of all, namely, that of the modifying and correcting inflence that it may have on the instinctive affectional sphere, and therefore on the sentimentality and morality of criminal children or those who have gone astray. And it is especially from this point of view that the educational cinema may be most efficacious, especially since everybody feels the necessity of finding a new means of education that will enrich the culture and develop the practical intelligence of such children, and will also act directly in those psychological situations which so frequently cooperate with the very abnormalities of the individual personality in the development of the various criminal tendencies and habits. Still in the same connection, we must remember also that the education of these children, as we recently had occasion to point out (1) must respond to certain fundamental medico-pedagogical criteria which deal with the necessity of first improving the child physically, before proceeding to the no less difficult task of reclaiming it morally. And we also pointed out that this work of physically improving the criminal or perverted child must always be not only opportune but also as wide spreading and deep as possible, a work that is rendered easier by the special cerebral malleability which is general in children, and is the greater in inverse ratio to their age. In fact, with regard to this primary necessity of physical improvement, it is well known how (1) S.De Sanctis. Psicologia Sperimentale. (Experimental Psychology). Stock, Rome, 1930. (1) B. Di TuLLIO. Per la rieducazione dei minorenni che delinqnono. Criteri fondamentali di medicina pedacogica emendativu. (For the Education of Delinquent Minors. Fundamental Criteria of Emendative Pedagogical Medicine). " Rivista di Diritto Penitenziario ", N. 3, 1933.