“MOVIES OF SCHOOLS.”

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 July 1930, Page 11

“MOVIES OF SCHOOLS.”

When we were small boys' it was a, favourite trick of our fathers to deride new fangled methods of pedagogy with the significant remark, “They didn't do such things when I went to school. Then we had to buckle down and study. Now all you do in school is play.”' And we have often wished that we had a motion picture of that school in order to make sure that boys in that long, long ago were any more serious than we were or than boys are to-day. Children in a New York school, will not be able, to check on their father’s schools but they will be able to disparage the practices of their children’s schools —and prove their statements, providing they are right. For a camera and a Western Electric recording system invaded the first and sixth grade classes of this school recently and came away with an indelible record of these children at work.

It is improbable that many classes in many schools will have this experience of having their sessions photographed and recorded but it is more than likely that typical and exceptional school groups and ages will be filmed in various parts of the Dominion at no distant date. And this library in celluloid will be available in future years. To catch children in their mobile development is like making a, close study of a flock of fast winging birds. To record in sight and sound children in their ordinary routine of schoojwork is' a greater achievement than photographing wild game in tho centre of Africa, and is in many aspects more thrilling. For the study of children is fraught with the entrancing possibility of producing men and women that are as big as tho miraculous mechanical civilisation into which they have been born. With application man may yet catch up, as a number of tho students of our ago declare ho must, with the products of science. If Western Electric’s product contribute ever so. little to this larger man, it should bring a satisfaction not entirely common to the accruements of our daily labours. A.D.