SEEING IS BELIEVING

The star of the educational motion picture is definitely in the ascendant, despite the mistrust that its distant cousin, the ordinary movie has aroused in the minds of those who mistrust macadamized roads to learning. In the fields of science, the films have proven their value in illustrating processes that are not susceptible to demonstration in the ordinary way. For example, the physics class can see the intangible force of magnetism made concrete by animated drawings, while the biology class can watch, clearly enough on the screen, the moving forms of a tiny organism and the mysterious division of a living cell.

This year, the frontiers of the film at Harvard have been advanced beyond the field of the physical sciences. In the new and forward-looking department of Sociology, Professor Zimmerman is carrying on a significant experiment. He is assembling reels of film to make clear the little-known life of other civilizations, such as the Eastern, and to illustrate the economic factors involved. He hopes to clarify the exaggerated impressions that are so current with regard to the severity of rural life; and show how these remote patterns of living are affected by disturbances in capitalistic civilizations. He wants the class to have something more vivid than cold statistics upon which to base their opinions. The experiment is being conducted in a tentative spirit, without faddism. He has no intention of allowing the standard of scholarship to be relaxed.

The consequences of this step may be far-reaching. If the films succeed in Sociology, they may push forward into other fields.