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The Fact of 1925.
A TEACHER of English who lives in the arcanum of Pedagogy, where minds respond to pretty schemes and theories, enjoys observing the market-place of Cinema, where minds respond only to facts. It was, for example, once a fact that every audience showed enthusiasm for a pie so thrown by one character as to distribute itself over the face of another character ; movie-makers responded and produced a plentiful throwing of pies. Later it became a fact that pie-throwing caused little applause; the filmers promptly responded by discontinuing the hurling of pastry. They have always been willing to experiment with highbrow matter proposed by educators or with lowbrow ideas suggested by accident; but they have observed the resultant facts, never imagining that flat failure could, be theorized into success. They have been »ble to maintain their industry only by reacting to the effects observable in an audience.
The ordinary educator has no such ability to respond to facts. His field of experiment is so divided and multiform, his results so much a matter of interpretative guess-work, that if he sets out with a hopeful theory he may mistake failure for success. He has no immediate and indisputable verdict to guide him. If, for instance, he tries out some program of "socialization" or of "joy in the work," and if ten schools under peculiar conditions report progress, he will judge the experiment a success; whereas in ninety other schools, under normal conditions, the program may be demonstrably a course of destruction. During the last thirty years educators have frequently been the victims of hallucination: witness such devices as "teach in the large," "let the pupil do the teaching," "there is no transfer of acquired abilities," "make the ninth-grade work consist largely of observing society at work." A mind trained in adjusting to facts would not have needed ten years to recognize such falsities and to abandon them.
If, then, a movie-maker is sensitive to facts, and if an educator is not sensitive, what is a movie educator going to be? He is a hybrid. One-half of him lives in one element, the other half in a very different medium. Will the whole of him breathe by the lungs of fact or through the gills of theory? Promoters of Visual Education must choose by which method they will live.
There are doubtless commercial possibilities in an appeal to vague hopefulness, to such a prophecy as this one uttered by the United States Department of Education before the World War: "Within the next decade the moving picture will be the indispensable adjunct of every teacher The future
usefulness of the educational cinematograph bids fair to surpass the predictions of its most sanguine advocates." There are in the country hundreds of sanguine educators who will gladly boost this hope, acclaiming it from platforms and honestly fancying that they are heralding a bright era of pedagogic pleasure. They will be secure from the ridicule of old-fashioned teachers, because they can preface all their propaganda with the words of the most hard-headed of inventors, Edison: "I expect that moving pictures will take the place of most
books below the ninth grade With the moving picture I can teach
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