Page:The Educational Screen - Volume 1.djvu/13

ence. Our information will come from original sources, without dependence on hearsay or newspaper reports.

Having free access to, and wide contacts with both sides—the commercial and the educational—we shall be able to reach all sources of information; and because we shall be furnishing impartial publicity for every worthy activity in the whole field, this information will be eagerly given.

As the only magazine on the subject having adequate intellectual resources behind it, THE EDUCATIONAL SCREEN will be better able to distinguish the true from the false, the important from the unimportant—and better able to present this material in a form agreeable to the intelligent reader—than any publication that has yet appeared.

THE Educational Screen will give much careful attention to the theatrical movies, and expects to be frowned upon sternly by certain educators for its pains. We can perhaps spare these individuals and ourselves some futile correspondence by answering, in advance, the question, “Why waste time and space on such useless rubbish?”

The answer is simple. As far as the above policy is concerned, the intrinsic value of the movies matters not at all. It matters not whether the motion pictures are a poison or an inspiration, a curse or a blessing, an industry or an art. Whatever they are, they are exercising a tremendous influence—as yet uncalculated and perhaps incalculable—upon the mentality of millions in this nation today. Since the development of our national mentality, in any direction, is a fairly accurate measure of national education, this magazine is necessarily and vitally concerned with what is happening on the theatrical screen, and especially in front of it.

The screen educates—for better or worse—wherever it hangs. If there are 20,000 screens at work in the theatres and (possibly) 2,000 screens in use to any considerable extent in the schools, an interesting bit of statistics may be reached. Adopting always conservative figures amid the wild variation of so-called “statistics” on the question, we may note the following premises and conclusions:

If there are 20,000,000 children in 200,000 schools in the United States, and if only one school in a hundred possesses a screen in regular