Education: Mass Review

In each of four dusky projection rooms at 1600 Broadway last week, a small group of schoolteachers, pencils poised over marking blanks in their laps, sat watching the antics of Mickey Mouse, an erupting volcano, travelogs, Bobby Jones measuring a fairway. Part of an ambitious project that has been going on since May and will continue until September, they had seen and judged by last week some 1,500 motion pictures and expect to see several hundred more. What they propose to accomplish by this labor, undertaken for an advisory committee of Will Hays’s Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., is the first complete report on the educational possibilities of the U. S. commercial cinema.

The idea of using movies in classrooms is as old as the movies themselves. Thomas Alva Edison thought that the movies would be more important as an educational than as an entertainment medium. Nevertheless, of the 10,000 “educational” films now catalogued and available in the U. S. the overwhelming majority are dull, amateurish, or technically obsolete. Of the two biggest professional producers. Eastman Kodak Co. has manufactured since 1926 some 200 silent films on historical and scientific subjects, Electrical Research Products Inc. a scanty 40 sound films. Most Hollywood producers think that the effective market is too small for profit. Of the 300,000 schoolhouses in the land, only 10,000 have 16 mm. projectors and of these less than 700 are equipped for sound. With too few films to encourage new projectors and too few projectors to encourage new films, education by movie has never gotten off the ground.

Purpose of the present committee, financed by a $50,000 grant from the Hays office and manned by such potent schoolmen as Johns Hopkins’ President Isaiah Bowman, President Karl Taylor Compton of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director Mark May of Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, is to break this vicious circle by opening the vaults of Hollywood for school use. Four years ago broad-beamed Educator May and Dean Howard Le Sourd of the Boston University Graduate School set out to experiment in this direction by extracting morally helpful episodes from old feature films. Encouraged by Arthur De Bra, asoft-spoken Hays lieutenant who was once a teacher himself, they constructed a series called Secrets of Success. Educator May got the Rockefeller General Education Board to contribute $75,000 to the Progressive Education Association to test Secrets of Success next fall in a number of selected classrooms. Last week Experimenters May and De Bra were both on hand at 1600 Broadway, both confident that their reviewers have uncovered further unsuspected educational wealth. How schools and producers ought to divide the expense of editing and remaking the films for school projectors and setting up a national distributing agency, and what rentals should be charged, the present exploratory committee was not prepared to say.

One reviewer last week approved a Mickey Mouse as follows: “Mickey Mouse can teach children because he has a child’s point of view. Both a mouse and a child must look up at a door knob, and both see other things from similar perspectives.”