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2. An increase in the proportion of old people will tend to throw additional burdens on those who are fit to work. Therefore it may be necessary for entry into working life not to be postponed.

3. Restrictions on employment may alter the incidence of unemployment but only locally and temporarily. They cannot effect a cure.

4. Increased power of production should not result in much more leisure for all until we have overtaken (a) war losses, (b) pre-war deficiencies, e.g. slums. Anyway we Anglo-Saxons need to work for our health.

5. Children must be made less of a financial burden to their parents, even if they cannot become again financial assets.

6. Activity and experience are more valuable than instruction.

PROPOSALS

1. Employment under the age of 18 to be part-time and to be looked on as educational activity and experience. The poor and the less gifted not to have too much of it and the rich and the academically minded not to be deprived of it entirely.

(Note. I consider that I was lucky to have had opportunities for work as a farm labourer during my school-days in the last war.)

2. Thus the establishment of continuation schools is more important than, although not incompatible with, the raising of the upper age-limit for full-time schooling, but it is essential that the continuation school should:

(a) Be a focus for corporate life.

(b) Drop the word 'continuation' from its title. 3. Variety of organization to be preferred to tidiness of system. Voluntary bodies, commercial firms, &c., to be entitled to register schools, and to receive financial aid subject to their satisfying inspectors.

4. Organization not to outrun supply of suitable staff. Successful welfare officers, club leaders, &c., to be welcomed even if they are not trained teachers.

5. Activities to be creative, recreative, cultural, and vocational. Some classes to be arranged in co-operation with technical colleges.

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HOW THE COLONIES JOINED THE EMPIRE SIR,-I should not have troubled you further but for the fact that your reviewer asks for a reference, a somewhat odd request from one who, presumably, has a copy of the booklet at his elbow. However, the slave trade is referred to on pages 29, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48 and 50. I have not made an exhaustive search and it is possible that your reviewer may discover some other references if and when he comes to read the booklet.

There remains only the question of Lord Croft's use of the words "the native races ", and your reviewer finds in my defence of Lord Croft evidence that I am incapable of writing wisely or responsibly about the British Empire. I lay no claim to wisdom, but if there is anything irresponsible in what I have hitherto written your critic has not put his finger upon it.

I am well aware that the use of the word' natives' gives offence, but your reviewer does not reveal that the words quoted are used by Lord Croft for the special purpose of differentiating the internal troubles of India from their disputes with races from outside and in this connexion it is very unlikely to give offence to any responsible person, Indian or otherwise, but only to those who are anxious to find some peg upon which to hang a complaint.

Empire Industries Association,

9 Victoria Street, London, S.W. 1.

EMPIRE AND FOREIGN NEWS

RELIGION AND SCHOOL REFORM IN FRANCE

ELIGION is once again to be taught in the French trying to take a middle path and is not prepared to go over to a Nazi system 100 per cent.

The change in education in France is well worth considering for a moment. As in every other country, those in power have always wanted to get hold of the youth. French politics have been divided for years over the clerical question, and, while the Right has tended towards clericalism, the Left has been opposed to it.

Religious teaching was abolished many years ago, and only in Roman Catholic schools could children obtain a religious education. At the same time priests were not allowed to teach, and the teachers had to be laymen.

After 1918, when Alsace came back to France, religious teaching continued to be taught in its schools but the first Government of the Popular Front, under Monsieur Léon Blum, tried to modify and rearrange the system. Blum insisted that the schools would have to come into line with the other schools throughout the country, and, while not taking away the right of religious education, he said that its teaching would either have to be done outside the usual school-time, or that the children would have to stay in school one year longer so that they did not miss learning other subjects through the teaching of religion. Monsieur

W. A. WELLS.

Blum was violently attacked by the Right for this. Before 1901, when France had a State religion, all churches, including the Jewish, received Government grants. After that date the grants stopped.

Certainly Protestant and Jewish children will not be expected to take Roman Catholic lessons, and there is no doubt that special arrangements will be made so that these two sects at least receive some religious education. The teaching of the Jewish religion will, however, fit into the general plan of Jewish legislation which is now under consideration and is being conducted by Xavier Vallet, a notorious anti-Judaist. Quite recently he stated that France would have to come into line with the rest of Europe on the Jewish question, which means, of course, that the Jews are to be segregated, and the children either sent to special schools which must be supported by the Jewish community or given special benches apart from other children.

It is interesting to note that it was Xavier Vallet who protested vehemently against Blum as Prime Minister on account of his being a Jew.

The reintroduction of religious education is however indicative of the unrest which followed demands that French children should be taught along purely German lines.

This included the purging of the teaching profession, more attention to physical training, a reduction in the

number of university students, and the teaching of the three R's. as the basis of general education. Young workers would then be sent into agriculture or trade with the ability to read, write, and add, and no more than that.

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Marcel Déat, writing at the time, did not like the idea at all. Déat insisted that the defeat of France was not due to too much intellectualism but to intellectual decadence ". "Don't believe that gymnastics won the war ", he wrote. German sport is not something apart from her social, economic, and political system. It is only a tool of development among all these. Please let's not start building up the new France on the ritualistic worship of the muscular to the scorn of true culture and therefore of intelligence. Hercules had a small head, and to tell the truth he was as stupid as he was good. He would make a bad patron saint for the new France." S. H. KAHN.

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SCHOOL-DAYS IN GERMANY

T the beginning of this century it was a common custom for English parents to send their daughters to Germany to learn the language and to study music. There must be many Englishwomen of my generation who have vivid memories of the Germany of those days-memories that are perhaps difficult to reconcile with what we know of the country now. At that time, all English school-girls who loved music looked on Germany as a kind of semiParadisal land, where people did nothing but attend magnificent concerts and hear glorious operas, and where every one lived more or less in a perpetual dream of lovely sound. There were no Secret Police then, no Concentration Camps, no blustering Storm Troopers and, though the people were disciplined and kept in order, they were not afraid. Families were not rent asunder by different political views. There was no treachery between brothers and sisters, children and parents, such as now makes family life insecure, and almost intolerable.

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The town where I spent a happy year at the age of 17 was a most attractive one-very clean, with wide roads and tall houses whose window-boxes were always gay with flowers throughout the summer. It was bordered by wellkept pine-woods where we loved to feed the squirrels and birds. (“Well-kept pine-woods!" you may think. "How typically German!" Well, perhaps so-but wasn't their extreme tidiness better than woods strewn with

paper, bottles, and tins ?) There was a huge covered market, with a gallery running round it—so full of life and bustle, with peasant women in their gay costumes selling fruit and poultry and vegetables, and everywhere the most extraordinary and unfamiliar smells! Here we bought all kinds of fascinating trifles-ribbons and buttons and little china figures, queer little cakes and biscuits, and marzipan made up in shapes of animals and flowers, and all sorts of other things. And of course there were many open-air Beer Gardens, where we were sometimes allowed to sit under the trees and drink excellent coffee, and where in winter we learnt to skate in the long dark afternoons, under the light of fairy-lamps, to the playing of a first-class band.

I remember, too, the friendliness of the girls at the big high school where we went for gym. classes . . . and our piano master, who wore fierce upturned moustaches like the Kaiser, but was really the mildest of men. His most devastating rebuke for wrong notes and awkward fingers was usually-" But, come, come, dear Miss, what will the Mamma in England say?” And chiefly I remember our kind, stout, brown-eyed singing mistress, who had what I can only describe as an enormous soprano voice, and whose husband was chief baritone at the State Opera House. Great was our excitement when we were taken to hear him in a leading role, and greater still when we were invited, four or five at a time, to one of the musical At Homes that they gave periodically in their comfortable and spacious flat. There were usually from twenty to thirty people at these parties, many of them musicians with a big local reputation; but always we, the little group of English

school-girls, aged from 16 to 18, were treated as special guests of honour. Always there came to one or more of us the fearful moment when we were invited to sit for awhile on the sofa, that sacred seat in every German household, never to be occupied without special invitation from the hostess. When this great mark of favour was bestowed upon us, we were, of course, expected to converse politely with any other guest or guests who might already be established there and even those who spoke fairly fluent German were apt to find it deserting them at such a crisis.

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But the most embarrassing mark of esteem came at teatime, when at one end of the table would be placed a coffee-urn, and at the other an immense teapot for the benefit of ourselves alone. And while the rest of the company drank fragrant coffee with masses of whipped cream floating on it, we were handed cups of a yellowish, lukewarm, and absolutely tasteless liquid which our hostess proudly described as English tea", made specially for us. We drank it, of course, with expressions of deep gratitude and consoled ourselves with the cakes. Any one who knew Germany then will remember what they were like, and for the sake of others I will not attempt to describe them it wouldn't be fair, in war-time. When tea was over, the guests made music for one another-first, usually a duet from our host and hostess, and then song after song, melody after melody, from 'cello, violin, or piano: just spontaneous music-making for the sheer love of it. We school-girls listened in wordless rapture, and were finally sent home all aglow with excitement and gratitude. That was Germany as it used to be-and at a time, too, when political feeling was violently anti-British, owing to the South African War.

Of course no one could want to reconstruct the old Germany of forty years ago in detail. The world has moved on, and all countries have to develop along their own individual lines. But we may feel sad to think that no English mother could dream of sending her child to school in Germany now. It is German and Austrian mothers who have had to send their children to England, not only for education, but for safety! And we may sometimes wonder what has become of that old spirit of friendliness and kindliness, that attractive simplicity of life, well known to so many English people in bygone years. Can it have been entirely stamped out of existence by Hitler and his Gestapo?

We know, of course, that fear is an enemy to kindness, and without doubt the minds of the German people have been embittered and poisoned by fear. I heard some one say, soon after war broke out, that they must be "a nation of nit-wits" to have put themselves in the power of such a leader—and I sympathized with the speaker! But, in fact, they are not nit-wits, even if they are sheep, as their leader himself has said. And yet, perhaps not all, and not entirely, sheep; though we have to remember that those who are anti-Nazi and anti-war are not necessarily pro-British. Too much poison-propaganda has been poured into German minds during the last eight years for that to be possible, and it is strange, and rather distressing, to think that, after the war, our worst enemies will probably be the millions of school children who have been taught to distrust and despise everything British. It will not be easy to find an antidote to all this poison, which seems to have thrown the nation into a drugged stupor that has given birth to nightmares spreading over the whole of Europe.

Yet this stupor cannot last for ever, and, when other countries are freed from their nightmares, surely in Germany, too, the people will arouse themselves and find that they have had enough of darkness. Surely we may hope that their desire then will be for the light to shine once more in their beautiful land. We who remember it as it used to be must not let those memories altogether fade away, for they give us some hope for the future.

It is an interesting point that, according to one derivation, the word 'German' means 'shouter '-from an old Celtic word, meaning a loud cry or shout. The German best

known to us to-day is certainly a 'shouter', but we have 'shouters', too-both here and across the seas-and in the end we shall prove that we can shout louder than they can, and that what we shout is truth. We must go on shouting until this truth rings through the whole world, so compelling, so inescapable, that at last the deaf ears will hear and the blind eyes be opened. And then the German nation may be able to take a sane and balanced view of the events of recent years, and once more to possess its own soul.

Only when this happens can the best of the old Germany unite with the best of the new, and prepare, however slowly and painfully, to join with other nations in building a New World, whose emblem shall be the Rose of Love, and whose banners shall proclaim Truth and Tolerance and Joy through that highest form of Freedom which is ... Willing Service. EVA MARTIN.

EDUCATIONAL JOURNALS OF NEW ZEALAND

By Dr. H. C. McQUEEN, New Zealand Council for
Educational Research

A DOMINION with a population of barely one and a half

million cannot be expected to support more than a limited number of periodicals of any kind, let alone serious journals of the educational variety. There are in fact three such journals in New Zealand, but none of them is, or sets out to be, self-supporting; all depend on the organizations that sponsor them for their continued maintenance.

The Education Gazette is an official monthly sent free to every school in New Zealand. It contains official notices, and lists of vacancies for which applications are invited. Needless to say, most teachers turn to these advertisements first, not only in the monthly issue, but in the supplement normally available on the fifteenth of each month. (The supplement, it should be said, contains little but vacancy lists.) In its present form the Gazette contains a good deal more, however, and the April number has articles on the geometry of the sundial, making models with the fretsaw, biology in schools, conservation of natural resources, and in the Native Schools' Column' an account of an experiment in adult native education. The authors are not officers of the Education Department, but teachers who have ideas to communicate to their fellows. In the order of the topics given above the occupations of the writers are woodwork teacher, crafts instructor, science master, lecturer in agriculture, and headmaster of a native school. Although at the moment a new editorial policy, and a new format, are under consideration, it can be said that even in its present form the Gazette is much more useful and readable than some of the dull official publications of a similar kind that are produced in other parts of the world.

A New Zealander inclines either to consider his local intellectual products as much inferior to those of older countries, or to look on them with an air of satisfaction, expressed modestly in a common colonial phrase "Not so bad". I have no hesitation in lining up with the second group in commenting on National Education, the organ of the New Zealand Educational Institute, for it compares more than favourably with other teachers' journals. It is a readable monthly, and, although its slant is always towards the primary school (the institute consists almost entirely of primary school teachers), it draws on contributors with a wide range of experience in various fields-many of them not teachers. It is indeed read by numbers of people outside the teaching service, for it is almost the only monthly in New Zealand in which articles of general interest are published. Apart from the portions given to teacherpolitics—and these are presented in good journalistic style— the March issue has articles on Sense and Sentences-the General Nature of Grammar " In Praise of Rebels ", "The Shape of Ads. to Come " (by the publicity adviser to the National Savings Committee in Great Britain), "It's the Rain that Does It " (by a scientist engaged in research), "Art and Books and Boys and Girls" (by a librarian),

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New Entrants-Reminiscences", Home is What You See in It" (by an economist), " Progress and the Mechanised Arts" (by a ciné-photographer), "We Make It Ourselves " (by a journalist). The articles make good reading, whether one is a teacher or not, and it is not difficult to imagine the use that an energetic teacher could make of the information in them. So far as I know there is no educational paper in Great Britain that resembles National Education; the Schoolmaster, which is the organ of the comparable body of teachers, is a weekly, and devotes much more space to teacher-politics and to articles designed as direct teaching

aids.

There is a more noticeable resemblance between S.T.A., the journal of the post-primary teachers, and A.M.A. New Zealand post-primary teachers are organized in two main groups, the Secondary Schools Association, and the Technical School Teachers' Association. Both of these include principals and assistants, but there is a subsidiary association of secondary school assistants. All combine to finance a paper appearing six times a year. Two issues are usually given mainly to remits to be discussed at the annual conferences, and to reports of those conferences. The other issues, apart from matters of domestic interest to the association members, give space for teaching articles, and to book reviews, which consistently get proportionately more attention than is given in the other journals.

We in New Zealand have no scope for the production of an English Journal of Education, of a Columbia Teachers' College Record, or of a Washington School Life. Our educational journalism must necessarily be restricted to periodicals that cannot be classified with much that is familiar to educationists elsewhere. Close comparison of New Zealand papers with others is therefore not as a rule possible, but as a New Zealander who sees a considerable number of educational periodicals I may be permitted to think that ours are not so bad'.

Acc

NEW ZEALAND AND THE TEACHERS CCORDING to S.T.A., the official organ of the New Zealand Secondary Schools' Association, the Minister of Education has found himself unable to meet the wishes of the Association with respect to many matters on which he was approached. The Education Department was urged to make financial grants for subjects other than science, such money to be used for approved purposes, e.g. in history, the purchase of current periodicals and special text-books; capitation grants of at least 2s. 6d. for library purposes were also asked for. The reply was to the effect that further expenditure on these matters could not be considered during the war period. A resolution “That a new salary scale for post-primary teachers should be regarded as a matter of urgency, and should be such as to offer at least equal attractions and opportunities to those in the Primary Service" met, owing to Treasury opposition, with no better fate; nor did a request that, for purposes of superannuation, active service should be regarded as double time. In answer to a request that teachers in charge of school activities should be paid out-of-pocket travelling expenses, it was said that this appeared to be a matter for the games or sports clubs of the various schools. "Teachers are probably aware that no part of any funds supplied by the Government can be devoted to meet the expenses of any sports or games activities."

In the matter of Educational Publicity, however, the wishes of the Association have been met, and it is suggested that one of the most effective means of securing the required publicity would be to make use of Youth Centre organizations, Vocational Guidance Officers, and Careers Teachers. The possibility of using the Broadcasting Service in order to disseminate information is also being considered.

Discussions are also taking place regarding the implementation of the 5 per cent cost-of-living bonus. The Association asked for 5 per cent all round, or, failing this, 5 per cent on salaries up to £300 and thereafter £15 flat;

but the Government preferred to grant a £13 bonus to all over 18 years of age, single or married, with salaries up to £335, the bonus thereafter disappearing for each £3 of salary in excess of £335. It was promised that overtime and other extras would not be taken into consideration in determining salary for bonus purposes, but the Association states that this promise has not been kept. For example, a teacher's normal salary is £335; he augments this by overtime of, say, £30; his bonus drops from £13 to £3. Somewhat the same result follows from the inclusion of the married allowance in the calculation.

The Chief Inspector of Secondary Schools, Mr. E. J. Parr, who has earned the very warm regard of the profession, is retiring. Mr. E. Caradus, an old boy of Auckland Grammar School and a graduate of Auckland University College, has been appointed to succeed him.

CANADA'S GUESTS

S. B. L.

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'HE publication entitled Canada's Guests, issued by the interesting photographs depicting the activities of the children who, under the Children's Overseas Reception Scheme, have become part of the families in the Dominion. No fewer than 1,530 boys and girls have been sent to Canada under this scheme, which has just celebrated its anniversary. Children from all parts of the United Kingdom, from poor families and from middle-class homes, have settled down well, though all was not happy in the first few months. But the latest reports show that, with very few exceptions, all the children are happy and contented. In many districts doctors and dentists are giving their services, and hospital treatment has been given where necessary. Hobbies and craftsmanship are being encouraged. The question of training and employment is now arising for many of the older boys and girls, and careful consideration is being given to this matter through consultation between the parent-hosts, the Dominion authorities, and the parents at home.

U.S.A.

ACCORDING to the February Phi Delta Kappan, overwhelming support of America's educational philosophy and aims was registered in a recent survey of American

opinion. The American public, in general: (1) favours the present-day programme of public education; (2) believes that the public school should offer fair and equal opportunities to all youth; (3) favours a special programme for unemployed youth not in school; (4) is for freedom in teaching and learning; (5) will not be satisfied with a static educational programme.

More specific opinions were expressed as follows: Education is not over-emphasized to-day (73 per cent); discussion of controversial topics among young people approved (72 per cent); physical examinations for all children should be made every two or three years at public expense (86 per cent); as much tax money should be spent for Negro children as for whites (78 per cent); "quite a few highschool students should be working instead of at school” (54 per cent).

Half the replies agree that certain States are so poor that they cannot afford schools as good as those in other parts of the country, and 28 per cent of these would be willing to pay higher taxes to supply these States with federal aid. Such aid to poor families for educational purposes was S. B. L. approved by 72 per cent.

ARGENTINA

A COMMITTEE set up by the Argentine Government to

inquire into the conditions of the schools has brought an interesting minority report from Dr. Prospero G. Alemandri. Unlike his colleagues who ask for certain changes, but whose report is generally favourable, be declares that the condition of the schools in some parts of the country is deplorable. In one school for 750 children, the doctor found conditions, sanitation, everything in fact, appalling. Old buildings were used, children could not learn because they were both uncomfortable and unhealthy. At Las Brenas he said 994 children were not being taught in a school at all but in the ruins of a school. They seem to have been forgotten, and, while the building crumbled round them, the teachers tried to teach. No repairs were ever made. At Quitilipi, 851 children were taught in a school which would take just about one-tenth of that number.

The newspapers have ignored the Committee Report, are printing the minority report, and demanding an immediate improvement.

NEW MEDIA

AN EXPERIMENT WITH FILMS
II.—Testing the Retention-value of Film Tuition

By GLADSTONE DUNKERLEY

ROPERLY used, film tuition is almost bound to show

such powerful potentialities as a means of instruction. In the experiment described in the last article this was amply borne out in the results of an immediate test of knowledge imparted by film and non-film techniques, the average score for the film-taught children being 8.5 per cent higher than that of the non-film children. But the main value of film methods of tuition is claimed in the higher retention which these methods produce; it is not the mere vividness of the film, producing stronger immediate memory, which is the justification for the use of films in schools, it is the real long-term remembering which the films can induce. This means that the film technique can present material in such a way that it can be remembered for a longer time, and that it must therefore be more understandable or absorbable. This theory was tested in the experiment previously described by giving a delayed test six weeks after the immediate test. The test was given under the same conditions, at the same time of day, and, since the examination paper set for the immediate test had not been revised in any way after the test, and since it was retention or memory

S. H. K.

which was being tested, the same examination paper was used. The children seemed to find it harder to answer the questions than in the immediate test, which was to be expected, but nevertheless they seemed consciously to try to remember the facts rather than write down the first answers which came to mind. They were allowed the same time for answering the paper as in the case of the immediate test.

ANALYSIS OF RESULTS

The marks obtained in the delayed retention test ranged from 28 per cent to 85 per cent for the class as a whole, i.e. both groups together, this range being made up of one of 45 per cent to 85 per cent in the Film Group and 28 per cent to 77 per cent in the Non-film Group. It will be seen that the range of marks for the two groups together has decreased only slightly during the six weeks' interval, and the extreme distributions of the film and non-film children has also remained much the same, there being four film children at the top of the list and five non-film children at the bottom. There was one surprising fact which emerged from analysis of the marks, and that was that there had been a general increase in the marks obtained for the delayed test compared with those obtained in the immediate test. It is in both groups that this increase took place, as witness the fact that the average score in the F Group had risen by

9.1 per cent, being now 70.5 per cent, and the fact that the average score for the NF Group had risen by 6.7 per cent, being now 58.9 per cent. It will be noticed, however, that the average for the F Group had risen to a greater extent than that for the NF Group, meaning that there is now a greater difference between the averages of the two groups, this difference being now 11.6 per cent as opposed to the previous difference of 8.5 per cent.

One possible explanation of the all-round increase in the average mark is that the children discussed the questions amongst themselves after the immediate test, but a more probable explanation in the present case is that for the delayed test the children were compelled to think more deeply over the questions and put down answers which seemed not only familiar but also logical. In the case of the immediate test, where the work had been done only a short time beforehand, the children probably relied on the immediate memory to supply the answers, without taking much notice of the logic of their thought. Logic cannot, of course, act as a substitute for knowledge, but, where there is a possibility of two or three answers being offered as correct, logic can help in deciding which is to be written down as probably right. An answer which has been sifted mentally from remembered facts as being the most likely will probably eventually be remembered as being the actual correct answer as opposed to a possible answer which has been rejected on the grounds of absurdity. It is probable that some such mental reasoning or unconscious process as this had gone on in the minds of the children to produce more correct answers than was the case with the immediate test where first attempts at remembering were taken as being correct.

Numerous other experiments have been performed in recent years to investigate this question of retention, and the data from twenty-four different experimental comparisons offer valuable evidence on this point. The experiments were direct comparisons of the effectiveness of film and non-film techniques, like the experiment described in these articles, and the children in these twenty-four experiments were tested very soon after the presentation of the material and again after periods ranging from a few weeks to several months. The results are worth examining in some detail.

In thirteen of the comparisons there was an increase, from the immediate test to the retention test, in the superiority of the film technique over the non-film technique; in nine cases there was no relative change in the superiority of the film technique over the non-film from immediate test to retention test. This leaves only two of the twenty-four comparisons as showing an increase in the value of the non-film technique with respect to the film technique over the period of time between the immediate test and the retention test. In point of fact, both these increases in the apparent superiority of the non-film technique over the film technique from the immediate to retention results were due to a decrease in the superiority of the film technique alone, from immediate to delayed tests. In no case, therefore, did the non-film technique increase in value compared with the film technique in the retention test.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

It has been said that “ three of the most important merits of the film method are its ability to create lasting impressions, to provide clarity of thought and presentation, and to furnish experience by which the subject-matter may be remembered longer and understood better ". The findings of the experiment described bear out this conclusion, since the gain of the film-taught children over the orally-taught in the immediate test showed that the film method has the advantage of clarity of presentation and ability to create impressions which were more vivid than it was possible to produce by other means. In the immediate test the question as to whether or not films permit of longer memory cannot be decided, since the difference in the average scores for the

two groups was in itself not great enough to have such a significance. The other indications, however, such as the general gain in position of the children placed in the Film Group, and the corresponding loss in position of the children placed in the Non-film Group with regard to a normal science test, as well as the distribution of the groups within the total scores for the test, show that there has been a better understanding, even at that stage, on the part of the children in the Film Group and that therefore we might reasonably expect better retention on the part of these children over a long period.

In experiments carried out by other investigators delay periods of up to several months were used, and the fact that six weeks only had elapsed between the immediate and retention tests in the present experiment would preclude any startling result. Nevertheless, the tendency is clearly shown in that the difference between the average of the two groups has increased over that time, showing that the experimental results are of increasing significance as time goes on. The distribution of the scores is altering, and grouping is taking place round the 50 per cent line roughly, yet the extreme distributions are relatively unaltered, and the tendency for the film scores to remain relatively higher than the non-film scores is clearly seen. This tendency indicates that a test taken after a further period of time would show that the film scores are stabilizing in a higher position than the non-film scores, i.e. that the film-taught children are remembering better and longer as a consequence of having understood better in the first place. This, of course, is a theoretical conclusion which can be proved only by a further delayed test, but it is a conclusion which is not without foundation in view of the indications which have been found.

There seems, therefore, no doubt about the value of the film in teaching, provided that it is properly integrated into the curriculum. The particular' film, as opposed to the general or background' film, needs especial care in films, especially in science subjects, is not to be undertaken this respect if it is to have maximum value. The use of in haphazard or casual fashion; if this is done, films become mere entertainment and a waste of valuable time which would be more profitably used in ordinary aided oral teaching methods. Films can, without any great alteration or upset of existing teaching techniques or time-tables, be used to great advantage, the one great advantage being that they can give lasting and vivid impressions of knowledge to be gained in a way which the best of teachers

cannot better.

Broadcasts to Schools. In announcing the publication of its Annual Programme of Broadcasts to Schools for 1941-42, the B.B.C. points out that, despite war-time conditions and enemy action, the School Broadcasting Service has been maintained without interruption. For 1941-42-the third "educational year" of the war-the programme has again been planned on a yearly basis. The News Commentary for Schools has proved popular with schools and the general public alike and it has been decided to continue it in the intervals between the normal school broadcasting terms. During the three school broadcasting terms, which extend over thirty-five weeks, there will be, in addition to the daily News Commentary, thirty broadcasts a week intended for children of varying ages and in different types of school. The broadcasts vary from "Music and Movement and Let's Join In !", intended for Infants, on the one hand, to series like Intermediate French ", Talks for Fifth Forms" on "Science and the Community" and "Talks for Sixth Forms", intended for senior secondary school pupils. Between these extremes there are ten series intended for children in junior schools, eight for children in senior schools and six intended for a wide range of children in both junior and senior schools. Most of the main subjects in the school curriculum figure in the programme, and among special features is a series on

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