Back in the 1960's, in my elementary school class, we'd occasionally get to watch a film in our classroom. I recall it vividly, the teacher would draw the blinds on all the windows and have us drag our sturdy wooden chairs together and the otherwise austere classroom would take on a warm cozy feeling, especially during the lazy, hazy days of June. Then the teacher (always shushing us, for this was a time when we could relax a little) would fiddle a bit with the school's only  projector (sometimes getting help from some intrepid young male in the classroom) and the machine would literally sputter to a start. Some theme music would come up and then, on the screen, some National Film Board of Canada production, promoting wholesome Canadian values. I particularly recall a movie about a busy beaver that had a catchy little song extolling the virtues of hard work which my twin brother considered 'propaganda.' These films are still available through the NFB archives.

Back in 1923, it is claimed in the excellent essay Paying the Piper, Thomas Edison proclaimed that the motion picture medium, which he was so instrumental in developing, was going to revolutionize education. It didn't. The same thing was said about television in the 50's and yes, about the Internet in the 90's.  None of this has happened. Our world whirls ahead technologically, (with periods like 1908-1913 and our present era experiencing exponential progress) but school, as an institution,  pretty well stays the same. As Neil Postman said, school is based on books. To put it another way: books are the ideal technology for school.  So, my son, who has just graduated high school, got to watch a few feature films in school, too, over the years, but not of the educational kind; commercial films. The teachers sort of had to figure out ways to make the movies relevant to the course work.  The purpose of these exercises was no different from back in my 1960's classroom, to let the kids relax a bit. The kids knew it even if they had to write an essay on some aspect of the film.

An explanation for this may be found in the fact that technologies become popular because they are 'fun' and school is not a place to have fun. The automobile, the airplane, the motion picture, at the beginning they weren't considered important or even useful, they excited people for the thrills they supplied. Thomas Alva Edison, who practically invented the modern world but who also made some disastrous business decisions, eventually focused on educating people rather than entertaining them, at least with respect to this film business. (Perhaps just because there was so much competition in the entertainment side.)  But average people, unlike super-focused inventors, just want to get their jollies and his film business collapsed in 1918, just as the motion picture industry was really taking off.

Here's an exterior link to an excellent essay by John Lienhard in the Engines of Our Ingenuity that explains it all.

All of the essays on Lienhard's web site are about how technology changes us and are highly recommended.

The irony, of course, is that I intend this web site to be of educational value. Only the medium of the Internet allows me, as a writer with a background in education writing, to cobble together various images and articles, under an umbrella theme '1908-1913', creating a kind of documentary that allows the viewers to investigate personal interests and  make their own decisions about the times and how the past relates to the present and their own lives (well, sort of, for every structured body  of information has a point of view woven into it). Indeed, without modern technology, I wouldn't have access to a lot of the material I used as background to the Nicholson Letters: some of the magazines I have purchased off Ebay are rather rare and unique and populist, not the kind of magazines preserved on microfiche in library archives. Even scholars don't have easy access to them.