matically secure simplicity. There is a large element of fixity in the most changing society, but the proportion of change is large enough to make choice constantly necessary.

The article in question rightly insists that the solution of problems concerning industrial and social injustice must ultimately be found in morality based on certain oldfashioned virtues; but here again the author does not recognize the inevitable and continuous need of re-adjustment to meet the new situations produced in the varied interactions of the different groups. He wonders why society does not explode and says it does not because so many people are "bearing their ills with the self-restraint required by accustomed moral standards." Will "bearing ills" ever cure social injustice? The ethical soundness of our industrial systems and ideals will depend on the extent to which oldfashioned virtues lead to a sympathetic understanding between the groups involved. Dewey's test for measuring the worth of any form of group life would condemn the I. W. W., or any organization similarly disposed, as contrary to democratic ideals.

Can reverence for time-tested standards ever be a guarantee of social health. The old advice to hold fast to that which is good is always pertinent, but it is always misleading. "New occasions teach new duties" and even if time does not "make ancient good uncouth" it does make it inadequate. Our social problems call for a new ethics which does not discard fundamental verities but which extends and interprets them in a way to meet the moral needs of the age. Group relationships differ with the size and nature of the group, and conscience with regard to duty differs in different groups. The old-fashioned virtues must be projected into group relationships. This does not take place automatically. The individual needs much training in cooperative thinking and activity before such a transfer of morals is effected. A present defect in our educational agencies is that they have done too little to develop social virtue. We cater to the selfish desire for mental development and the resulting personal advantage. This is the most prolific source of our

American individualism. We must seek to change the joy of individual work into the joy of cooperative work and to inoculate our people with the spirit of our institutions.

Finally, of all institutions in which conservatism and static ideals need no commendation that institution is the school. Education is proverbially conservative. Systems become fixt by devotees, and they always tend to keep the schools behind the times. Sequence of studies, subject matter, and even methods are determined largely by convention. The school deals much with abstractions which are imperfectly or partially applied. There is much superstition as to educational values. Devotion to curriculums, programs, and objective results tend to make the teacher a slave of convention. The task of educational reformers has always been to rouse men from effete ideals. Their reforms have been effected in so far as they have led the schools to accept psychological rather than conventional standards. Education based on a knowledge of the growing, playing, learning child can not become fixt or formulated. Furthermore, such education can not go far from the best interests of the various social groups, for it means maturity and sanity; and with these qualities the individual easily becomes both moral and social.

FRANK E. HOWARD

MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE

Middlebury, Vermont

IV

THE MOTION PICTURE AND CHILD

DEVELOPMENT

During the years 1915 and 1916 there appeared in various periodicals in this country some two dozen or more articles upon the general theme of the motion picture and its educational significance. The writer of the present article was the author of a paper entitled The educational possibilities of the motion picture, which appeared in the EDUCATIONAL REVIEW for November, 1915. The gist of all these score or more articles was, I believe, that the motion picture appeals to childhood, awakens interest, teaches thru the eye, and, therefore, should be introduced widely into the public schools as a means of vivifying instruction. Personally, as my own contribution to the discussion would indicate, I was very strongly inclined to this position, and do not feel moved to recant at the present time.

Somewhat more recently, however, there has arisen a general agitation thruout the country not alone for more educational film, but for more clean, harmless film for the boys and girls who go more or less regularly to the public moving picture houses. If I interpret correctly the trend of sentiment upon this point among teachers and the more intelligent parents, there is a growing body of opposition to the type of program which the 20,000 or more public moving picture theaters in this country are serving up not only to their adult patronage, but particularly to the children who hie themselves away to their doors the moment school is over and playtime begins.

It is then the purpose of this paper to study the theatrical moving picture as it is, with special reference to its psychological relationship to the child, and, in the light of this, to point out certain principles which it would seem must come

ultimately to control the selection and showing of films for strictly juvenile consumption.

The ordinary moving picture theater has something of the attraction for the young as has a powerful magnet for bits of steel filings. It has been estimated that every man, woman and child in America attends the moving pictures on the average of once a month. If now we make allowances for the millions who never attend, either thru personal scruples or because of their isolation, and again for the thousands who go only very rarely, we shall obviously have left a multitude of people who patronize this type of amusement certainly as often as once a week, more likely semi-weekly, perhaps even oftener. And if we could eliminate from this group all persons over sixteen years of age we should have left a great company of boys and girls, of pre-adolescents and adolescents, of infants in arms, who sit now innocently, now in partial comprehension, now under full stress of the emotions, gazing at the animated screen.

The question is often asked, what are the hygienic effects upon the child's mind of the promiscuous type of moving pictures such as the public theaters are showing? Fundamentally, the moving picture makes its appeal to the younger child thru his imagination, not thru his emotions. The emotions are not brought into prominence until adolescence. But the new, strange, wonderful things he sees upon the screen feed his imagination and for hours after he has left the theater he continues to play with his imagery and to revel in the new combinations which it suggests. It matters not whether it be a simple tale, like Alice in Wonderland, or a deep passion-inspired and passion-inspiring drama, or yet one of the lower types of comedy, whose only title to adult applause rests upon their questionableness or their suggestibility for certainly the average adult theatrical taste has been so long outraged that unusually passionate or emotional or suggestive depths must be touched in order that a picture may be creditably received. Whatever the nature of the play, then, it is sure to find fertile soil in the imagination of the child. We have said that it is thru the channels of a real,

warm, living imagination that the motion picture makes its appeal to young children. They clap their hands, they laugh and shout, they watch the screen breathlessly, expectantly— not perhaps because they are able to enter into the plot of the drama and await eagerly the downfall of the villain and the elevation of the hero, but because new and novel situations are passing before them on the screen, and their bursting minds are being filled ever fuller and fuller with strange, incomprehensible yet withal deliriously pleasing and delightfully meaningless imagery. Hand-clapping, shouting and stamping become a necessary and spontaneous physical outlet to the sheer satiety of mind.

In the case of older children, not only are the imaginative powers stimulated by all this passing panorama of humor, tragedy and pathos-and bathos-but now the theme of the plays is followed more intelligently. The beauties and the sacrifices of human love, the great adult problems of justice and morale, are separated by a mere matter of seconds from scenes depicting drinking, gambling, shooting, stabbing; sex plays in which human relationships are all too suggestively depicted alternate with the so-called problem plays in which the social vices are emphasized unduly in order to point a more compelling moral. It is this latter type of film that is particularly dangerous to young adolescents. New forces of which they know little, strange conditions which are at first bewildering and meaningless, deep-rooted racial passions and emotions of which they have not yet dreamed, situations which they have never before met-and probably never will in actual life; determining tendencies whose force they can not fathom nor measure all these are fed into the young adolescent's feverish, restless, half-dormant soul with results that perhaps we can not determine, or even estimate. This portrayal of vice, of depravity, of drunkenness, of murder, of brigandage, this premature exposé of adult passions, adult lust, adult vengeance; this wresting the lid off the dregs of society, this unveiling, as it were, of the tree of life— all this can not but be too suggestive of emulation and imi