Visual Education (Jan-Nov 1920)

What is an Educational Motion Picture? 25 and commercial brains that have made the attempts. Their efforts were a necessary part of the development of educational films. I should like to call attention to what I consider the fundamental criterion of an educational film. A film to be educational must correlate with a curriculum; it must correlate with class room or lecture work. In order to do tins it is absolutely imperative that the films be prepared so as to fit a sjdlabus or outline of instruction. Certain facts, principles, operations or ideals are to be taught. Enumerate them; arrange them in a teachable order, and then parcel out the teaching procedure among the various teaching media, such as the recitation, the lecture, the laboratory, the field trip, the home exercise, the problem, the film, the lantern slide, the demonstration, etc. When educational films have been fitted into the educational regime in such a manner they will be serial in character. Film so and so will precede or follow lecture so and so. The film equipment for any given course will in all likelihood consist of a series of films definitely placed in the course of instruction. One does not need to know much about the so-called educational films now on the market to realize how hopelessly out of place they are. No commercial film organization can produce educational films without the close cooperation of those whose profession it is to teach. Motion pictures have had entertainment as their primary purpose and that will peihaps always be the most general purpose of motion pictures. Without depreciating in the least the legitimate place of motion pictures for purposes of entertainment, it is necessary for us to keep in mind that educational films have a utilitarian purpose. If a film that purports to be educational is too entertaining we had better look it over again to see if it is really educational. If we can make educational films interesting, attention-holding, and entertaining, so much the better. But the point I wish to make is that a film may be of the very highest educational value as a teaching tool, even if it is extremely boring and uninteresting to the casual onlooker. The best textbooks about which the thinking student is enthusiastic and from which he receives professional inspiration are perhaps quite generally meaningless and uninteresting to the layman. Let us realize from the outset that an educational film is a teaching tool and that it should be accepted or discarded on its merits as a teaching tool. Its entertaining features are secondary but desirable, of course. The first catalogues of so-called educational films were probably prepared by listing, in a heterogenous collection, all kinds of films that happened to be available and which could be thought of as in some way instructive. Thus under the caption "Geography" would be listed any and all available films from foreign lands, and so on for other categories without any educational plan. These films have no doubt served a good purpose for isolated occasions in which some combination of entertainment and instruction was desired. ISTo doubt such classifications will continue to serve a good purpose, but the real educational films will be the ones that are prepared to fit in as a part of the teaching routine in organized courses of instruction in the public schools and in the colleges. There is a further distinction in terminology which I should like to suggest