Visual Education (Jan 1923-Dec 1924)

November, 1924 PICTURED LIFE FOR HOME, SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY 373 A School Film Leader in England "K1 INEMATOGRAPHY is a Cinderella among British industries." So speaks an educator who for the last fifty years — since the tender age of twelve — has taught British youth in primary and secondary schools, and who for thirty-four years has devoted his leisure time to practical social work in the great city of Birmingham, now teeming with a million inhabitants. From the time that motion pictures promised to be a useful adjunct to school work, Mr. T. W. Trought, Lecturer in English and Mathematics at the Chester Training College for Schoolmasters, and now Headmaster of a great Birmingham School vised as a model practice school for University students preparing for the teaching profession, has been one of the few continuously active workers for their nation-wide adoption in Great Britain. As a member of the British Cinema Commission he has carried on an investigation of school movie practice in forty countries of the world, including the principal British colonies, and, based on the tabulated results of the inquiry, has formulated and issued an appeal to the Prime Minister and the English Board of Education which brings England's backwardness in the use of school films forcibly to the attention of the public and the government. As new movements this sort which require some support from the public treasury, either local or national, are in England necessarily semi-political, Mr. Trought and the Cinema Commission have adopted the only method which promises national results, and are fighting the battle for the English schools on points which apparently already have been won in the United States and in some other countries. Mr. Trought's life has been one of intense interest to the active American citizen who is apt to think of the English professional man as a staid conservative. Rather paradoxically, he was won over to the educational film idea through his wide and intimate experience with the needs of delinquent children and the causes of delinquency. As an officer of a small relief organization founded in 1891 by of T. W. Trought, B.A., J.P. Headmaster, Camden St. School, Birmingham, England the late Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, he worked to cover Birmingham with similar organizations until the time came for their amalgamation into a great civic organization with over a thousand voluntary workers and an annual disbursement of many thousands of dollars. He was made the joint Secretary of this great Birmingham Aid Society. , All this time he was studying children, both in school and out. In 1911 Mr. Trought was appointed a Justice of the Juvenile Court, the only school teacher in active service to be appointed to the Birmingham Bench of Magistrates. Since then child welfare has been his principal aim and study, and through his interest in it he has been impelled to keep up an active and forceful campaign for the adoption of real educational films in school and in young people's clubs. Although a former army officer, Mr. Trought was thought too old to be sent to the front, but was put to work where his experience counted immeasurably for the good of his country. The British Home Office was much concerned at the increase of juvenile delinquency caused principally by the general lowering of morale in a belligerent nation as well as by the absence of fathers at war and the absorption of many mothers in industry. Mr. Trought threw all his time outside the school room into the secretarial duties of the Birmingham Juvenile Organization Committee of which the aim was to foster wholesome use of leisure time by recreation and education in young people's clubs. Here was his opportunity actually to bring the "cinema," as it is called in England, into use as part of the regular school and club equipment ; and he did it without hesitation, thus gaining the experience which has made him the foremost school authority on educational films in England today. As a result of his experience, Mr. Trought was called upon to submit a paper on "The Cinema and Child Welfare" to the International Congress of Child Welfare at Geneva in 1923, which has been noted by the press of several nations because of its clear exposition of the British Cinematograph Act,