Public Schools: Potent Pictures

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PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Cinema, that still most magic medium—portable, cheap, displayable in any place at any hour, infinitely capable of recording knowledge, vastly surpassing TV in screen size, picture quality and color—theoretically ought to be a universal teaching tool. Currently, four U.S. schools are saturating themselves in film in an attempt to make the ideal a reality.

Film has not been shunned because it is scarce. Some 250 companies have churned out 28,000 educational films—a rich, if spotty, lode of material largely unworked by U.S. teachers. The trouble with films, says Dr. Wayne Howell, director of educational development for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc., has been their "impossible logistics." Teachers have had to request films far in advance from distant distribution centers, use them upon arrival even if their class was not ready, ship them back immediately. Heavy, complex projectors have had to be hauled from storage, set up in the classrooms, operated skillfully. Films have been "an intrusion in the classroom rather than a help," says Howell.

Smash Success. To beat the logistics problem and find out just how effective film can be when teachers can integrate it naturally into their instruction, E.B.F. and Bell & Howell Co. have sent $650,600 worth of films and new, automatic-threading sound projectors to schools in wealthy Shaker Heights, Ohio, a slum area of Washington, D.C., suburban Daly City, Calif., and rural Terrell, Texas. Researchers from Ohio State University are evaluating the three-to four-year experiment under a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. Although the researchers' verdicts are months away, teachers and students already consider Project Discovery a smash success.

In Shaker Heights, each of Mercer School's 28 classrooms has a 16-mm. projector and a screen in a corner, which often pulls down in front of the room's television receiver. The firstfloor film center contains 600 wellcatalogued movies and 1,100 filmstrips (movie film to be projected one frame at a time, like slides).

Messing with Creation. Mercer's teachers are free to use the movies any way they see fit; the fifth grade's Mrs. Blanche Brack says film producers have been "horrified" at the way teachers have been "messing about with their creation." She prefers to show fragments of many films, repeatedly stopping the action to quiz the kids on what they just saw, what they expect next. She had her pupils draw up their own narration to a filmstrip on the "Causes of the Revolution" to replace the high-school level commentary that came with it. Her fifth-grade colleague, Eleanor Cohen, normally turns off movie sound tracks, delivers her own explanations, repeats film segments so that she "can control the speed of the learning progress." She finds this far preferable to the fixed programming of educational television, which she considers "too much of a dictator."