The Efficiency of Images: Educational Effectiveness and the Modernity of Motion Pictures

This essay places early educational film (roughly between 1900 and 1930) in the context of the impulse toward “efficiency” that swept the industrialized nations after the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on educational literature in the United States and discussions of medical education and training films in France and Germany, the essay describes how educators articulated the efficiency of the (moving) image, especially in terms of the cost of teaching or the psychology of learning. Ultimately, the essay argues that the deployment of visual materials in the classroom during this period is best understood through the rubric of “efficiency.”