The Entertainer Becomes an Instructor—Schools and Colleges make the Screen a Professor—Visual Instruction more Effective than Text-Books—Educational Films as Teachers of History—The Screen an Ally to Historical Accuracy—Can it Save the Race from a Threatened Cataclysm?
CHAPTER XII
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.