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CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS AND THE CINEMA The documents by the two boys who both are 1 3 show not only class differences with regard to their origin if compared with the secondary schoolgirls' essays, but, what is more important, they reveal a difference of educational standard which is so obvious that no further comment appears necessary. And yet these two boys represent in all probability a not negligible percentage of our cinema-going youth. How can their minds resist the emotional temptations films offer? How can they become appreciative of life, its obligations, its beauties, its disappointments? They are 'moviemade', even before they begin to live.
Another experiment was undertaken with a North Paddington L.C.C. Junior School. We obtained about 100 essays on the subject The Films I Like from two classes (boys and girls) of about 10 years. We analysed the essays, but found we could not incorporate them in this book, having asked already for too much indulgence from our readers and our publishers. The essays show a distinct preference for technicolour films (expressions like 'pretty', 'nice', occur almost in every contribution). There is also a marked lack of plot-consciousness which I venture to explain by the early stage of language-development of these 1 o-years-old children who have mainly workers, clerks, employee or lower middle class people as parents. Piaget has, I think, admirably described the structure of the child's thought in his great book, The Language and Thought of the Child. I take the liberty of quoting for the convenience of the reader who may not have the book at hand some of the relevant sentences:
(1) 'It (the child's thought) is non-discursive, and goes straight from premises to conclusion in a single intuitive act, without any of the intervening steps of deduction. This happens even when thought is expressed verbally; whereas in the adult only invention has this intuitive character, exposition being deductive in differing degrees. (2) It makes use of schemas of imagery, and (3) of schemas of analogy, both of which are extremely active in the conduct of thought and yet extremely elusive because incommunicable and arbitrary. These three features characterise the very common phenomenon called the syncretism of thought. . . .'
'Now childish ego-centrism seems to us considerable only up till about 7 or 8, the age at which the habits of social thought are beginning to be formed. Up till about 7 J, therefore, all the child's thought, whether it be purely verbal (verbal intelligence) or whether it bear on direct observation (perceptive intelligence),
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