Visual Education (Jan 1923-Dec 1924)

March, 192 3 75 the technique of its construction should wait upon the identification of its more fundamental merits. Analysis of form at the wrong time has been a serious handicap in the effort to insure appreciation of literature — and appreciation, we take it, is a prerequisite to constructive criticism. THERE are two fundamental standards of all art that even adolescents can be encouraged to apply to the pictured drama. One is the standard of truth, the other is the related standard of sincerity. A work of art, whether it be fanciful or realistic, must meet these two tests if it is to endure. It is the essence of great art that it creates an imaginary situation, per haps with an almost complete illusion of "fact" as in Robinson Crusoe, perhaps with so fantastic and impossible a setting as Alice in Wonderland; but through this created situation a human truth shines forth. To lead boys and girls to recognize in a pictured drama this first essential of art with the same unerring certainty that they recognize it in the masterpieces of De Foe and Carroll, is to take the most important step toward "better movies." HOWEVER this may be, the proposals for the serious study of moving pictures in the high schools give us a most promising constructive suggestion toward solving a crucial social problem. President Harding on Educational Films PRESIDENT HARDING'S endorsement of the moving picture as an aid to study shows the Chief Executive in a kindly, common-sense mood that many Americans believe to be characteristic of him. How much, he says, as reported in the Knickerbocker Press, of what we study in our youth might be "made dramatically interesting if we could see it. . . . Next to studying history by the procedure of living through its epochs, its eras and its periods, would be to see its actors and evolutions presented before our eyes." The President hastens to add that he would urge nothing that would "save the pupil from serious, hard, disciplining mental effort." He would use the pictures only to provoke interest in the real work that must be done if minds are to be developed. He wishes, for instance, that he could see "Henry Esmond" fittingly portrayed upon the screen. Accompanied with studies and lectures on the history of the period, it would constitute an ideal method of imparting knowledge and of arousing a thirst for more. Mr. Harding confesses, indeed, that good pictures and good books set him to ransacking every other available source for information in regard to their period and their story. "If we are to understand the present and attempt to conjecture the future," he says, "we need to know a good deal about their backgrounds in the past. The Europe of the later middle ages, of the period just before and at the beginning of the Renaissance, would be wonderfully portrayed in a series of pictures dramatizing 'The Cloister and the Hearth.' I do not know whether anybody reads 'The Cloister and the Hearth' any more, but I am sure that one family with which I am pretty well acquainted would be glad to patronize a combination of picture serials and really intelligent talks with this story as the basis, and with the IN NEARLY every small town and village anywhere and everywhere you go throughout the country — you find the movies. They are a part of our life; their scope is constantly being enlarged and improved. What can be done with them as a means of imparting knowledge already has been demonstrated; it is for us to utilize them on a larger scale and adapt them to the peculiar purposes of education. Within that celluloid film lies the most powerful weapon for the attack against ignorance the world has ever known. — DR. JOHN J. TIGERT, U. S. Commissioner of Education. purpose of giving a real conception and understanding of the Europe of that epoch." Mr. Harding suggests also a combination of Trevelyan's history of the American revolution, "Janice Meredith," Parkman's Indian histories, and Irving Bacheller's "In the Days of Poor Richard," the latter a novel which includes within its scope King George III, George Washington, Hamilton, John Adams, Benedict Arnold, and the whole glamor and color of the revolutionary epoch. This, he believes, would "produce a wonderful impression upon the student's mind of the events and their meaning." So, too, he would like to have the "Outline of History" and the "Story of Mankind" put into motion pictures, as well as films taken under competent direction in the Federal Bureau of Standards, and others to illustrate the fundamental principles of the fascinating science of geology. "Again," he concludes, "I would by no means eliminate the studying. I would at all times keep in mind that there cannot be real education without those efforts that train and discipline the mind and develop its powers of analysis and correlation."