THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE
THE utilitarian evolution of the movie has been as remarkable as the recreational—though much less spectacular. The screen seems to have come like a poultice to heal the blows of ignorance, of worn-out methods in schools, hospitals and laboratories, and to act as a tonic upon all the movements and enterprises that make for the betterment of the race. Modern scientists, philanthropists, statesmen, educators, sociologists, uplifters of all kinds, may appropriately paraphrase Robert Burns by exclaiming “a screen’s amang ye takin’ notes.”
Visual education—that is, intellectual stimulus through motion pictures—has made amazing progress in our schools and colleges during the past few years. It has been proved by statistics, based upon the results of examinations, that students instructed by screen-pictures obtain higher marks than those who have been seeking knowledge on a given subject only through text-books.
Evidence upon this point has become of late cumulative and conclusive. Data to show that the Esperanto of the Eye is a more efficient instructor than either the spoken or the printed word is ours in abundance, but only one or two striking proofs of the proposition will suffice for our present purposes. Two years ago Professor Joseph J. Weber, of the University of Kansas, conducted a series of enlightening tests in Public School No. 62, New York City, with the following results:
Four hundred and eighty-five pupils in the school were examined as to their knowledge of geography. It was found that their average rating as a class was only 31.8. Oral teaching, without the aid of correlated motion picture films, raised this average presently to 45.5, a gain of 13.7. The films were then used after the oral lessons and an average of 49.9 was obtained, a gain of 18.1. By the employment of the films before instead of after the oral instructions the average percentage was increased to 52.7, a gain of 20.9.
At about the same time, Professor J. W. Sheppard, of the University of Oklahoma, made an experiment in visual education at a high-school in Madison, Wis. Abstract and concrete subjects were taught to a group of pupils of ordinary intelligence by means of the films only, to a second group by a superior instructor only, and to a third group by an average instructor only. In a searching examination subsequently the pupils taught by the films scored an average of 74.5, those taught by the superior instructor an average of 66.9, and those by the inferior instructor an average of 61.3. In this game of twenty questions the screen had won the pot by a safe margin.
The significance of the above is revealed in its entirety when we realize that even the movie as a purveyor of amusement has not wholly neglected its obligations as a pedagogue. The millions of Americans who daily watch the screen in quest of recreation are, willy nilly, obliged to absorb something in the way of added knowledge. Geography, history—both ancient and contemporary,—botany, astronomy, physics, ethnology, archæology and other educational sources are tapped, even in the least pretentious movie theatres, to stir the imaginations and enlarge the general knowledge of their patrons. It is safe to say that the American people, even though our schools and colleges had not welcomed the film as an aid to education, would have vastly increased their information regarding our planet and the history and achievements of the human race merely through the homage that the amusement screen has paid, perforce, to erudition.
But what the recreational screen has done casually and inadequately for the dissemination of general knowledge, is, of course, negligible compared with the influence that has been exerted by the educational films whose use in the class-rooms of our schools and colleges has been for some years past constantly on the increase. The growing importance of the film as an adjunct to instruction is shown by the fact that its progress has not been left to chance, as was the evolution of the recreational movie. The realm of visual education has been taken over by men and organizations whose qualifications for the task they have assumed assure to the screen in the class-room a great and splendid future. Concerning this matter, Will H. Hays recently said:
The Society of Visual Education contains thirteen presidents of colleges, six of normal schools, three representatives of large foundations, seventy-six professors and instructors in colleges and universities, nine state superintendents of public instruction and seventy-one city superintendents of schools. There are other groups of educators in the motion picture field—notably the National Academy of Visual Instruction and the Visual Instruction Association of America. An incomplete list shows twenty-eight colleges and universities which have organized departments for the distribution of films. At least seventeen of our largest educational institutions are giving courses to their students on the use of the motion picture for visual instruction. Columbia has courses which teach photoplay writing and the mechanics of production. The University of Nebraska has erected a film studio on its campus, and the Universities of Yale, Chicago, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Illinois and Utah have started the production of their own motion pictures.
Let us confine ourselves for the moment to what the educational films are doing in the realm of history, leaving their achievements as pictorial aids to the study of astronomy, physics, ethnology, palæeontology, geology, and other sciences, for later consideration. If the Esperanto of the Eye is to be instrumental in giving to this and coming generations an accurate picture of our race’s past, it is essential that our films dealing with history should be accurate in detail. A falsehood exploited by the screen can do more damage than a misrepresentation imbedded in a text-book. It is encouraging, therefore, to those of us who believe that educational films are destined eventually to exercise an influence for good upon mankind that may save it from a return to barbarism to realize that the screen as an adjunct to the teaching of history is receiving valuable assistance from our most eminent professors in this field of study.
There is much data at our disposal to prove that the Olympian heights of erudition are deeply impressed by the obligations which the enlightened gods owe to films fashioned to instruct lesser and more ignorant mortals. It will suffice for our present purpose, however, to prove the existence of a general and praiseworthy trend in visual instruction by giving, in some detail, an account of an enterprise, sponsored by the Department of History of Yale University, that is of importance in itself, but, more than that, significant in the promise it gives of a splendid future for the educational film.
In a despatch from Chicago, Ill., under date of Tuesday, August 1, 1922, a correspondent of the New York Evening Post says:
History was rewritten here to-day, shorn of its romance and amplified by facts, by the Yale University Press. To do this, mediæval sailors, dressed in gayly colored tights and jerkins, with huge knives in their belts, clambered through the rigging of the Santa Maria off Jackson Park, and Christopher Columbus leaned over the rail, crucifix in hand, and gazed at the receding shores, while two camera men kept grinding away at their machines. All this was done that the popular idea of history might be revised and the school children of America might have accurate information, uncontaminated by the legends and myths which have grown around the discovery of America during the last 400 years.... The Yale University Press is making a series of historical pictures for school use which the History Department of the University asserts will be as accurate as research and study can make them. On board the Santa Maria there were mutinies and troublesome times. Martin Alonzo Pinzon, a Spanish gentleman who owned the Santa Maria, commanded the Pinta, and furnished the cash for the expedition. Much more is made of Pinzon in the film than of Queen Isabella, the Professors of History at Yale being inclined to doubt the legend that Her Majesty ever patronized a pawn-shop to give assistance to the dare-deviltry of Columbus.
What visual instruction in history is to become presently is a fascinating subject in dwelling upon which the imaginative optimist, reading the signs of the times, can not but take keen delight. The past is to be to the student no longer a graveyard, in which he rambles confusedly, reading ridiculous epitaphs upon monuments whose comparative impressiveness is misleading, but a series of dramatic performances, appealing to the senses, the mind and the soul, in which the dramatis personæ will present history as a serial-play in which the latest act is one in which he himself is taking a minor part.
Never before, in the history of the race, has mankind taken so deep and wide-spread an interest in the past of mankind as it exhibits to-day. There appears to be a world-wide feeling that, unless the race can learn the lessons that the great catastrophes that have repeatedly overtaken civilization teach, the outlook for the future is appallingly dark. On New Year’s Day, 1923, a body of prominent American educators issued an appeal to the public in which the following striking sentences occur:
The present situation in international affairs, involving as it does the imminent peril of war, must give concern to every thoughtful observer. After a devastating conflict which has cost millions of lives, created immeasurable hatred and piled up a debt of $50 for every minute of time since Christ was born, the nations of the earth, apparently having learned nothing and forgotten nothing, are once more playing the old game of competitive imperialism and competitive armament.
The above, startling but unanswerable as it is, has a direct bearing upon the subject we have just had under discussion, namely, the teaching of history through visual instruction. The advantages of this method for schools and colleges, conclusively proven though it has been, will be of no permanent and uplifting value to coming generations unless the screen as a pedagogue finds a way to give to a race that is constantly repeating old and fatal errors a message and a warning that shall influence the young men and women who are to mould the world’s future to avoid the disastrous errors of their progenitors. From this point of view it becomes apparent that to those into whose hands has been placed the dissemination of educational films has been vouchsafed a great opportunity to benefit a race that is in sore need of guidance, of some impetus that shall make its future less deplorable than its blood-stained past.