Classroom Cinema

Fifteen million Americans in uniform have gone to the movies during the past five years to learn about such subjects as machine guns, camouflage, venereal disease. Why can't their younger brothers & sisters learn their ABCs the same way? In June, the State of Virginia passed a whopping $1,176,000 one-year appropriation for "visual education" in the public schools.

Several sizable film producers are already in the field, and hoping for a boom. The biggest so far, the University of Chicago's Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, offers a range of subjects from The Adventure of Bunny Rabbit (for kindergarten) to thermodynamics and electrochemistry (for college students). The MARCH OF TIME is rounding out its first year of Forum Films for schools, plans eight new titles by the end of 1946.

Last week a new company, Young America Films Inc., stepped into the still uncrowded field. Its head is energetic Stuart Sheftel, 34-year-old publisher of Young America magazine (circ. 400,000 schoolchildren) and co-founder of a chain of newsreel theaters. Young America is the first filmmaker with the audacity to promise movie courses for every class from kindergarten through high school. It will offer a three-part package: a one-reel short for $25, summing up the course, a "strip film" of pictures and diagrams tied to a popular textbook in the field, and a what-to-do-about-it manual for the teacher. Young America hopes to put out 100 basic films and eight documentaries by the end of 1946.

In the past, many U.S. teachers have resisted "visual education." One difficulty is making a film which will be equally intelligible to a first-grade city kid in Manhattan and a farm boy in Opportunity, Wash. A more redoubtable objection comes from teachers who believe that films are just another devil's device to take away the personal touch in education.

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