In 1922, Thomas Edison predicted motion pictures would “revolutionize our educational system.”
I can’t get over how Muskian he sounds (particularly on “efficiency” claims) and how — a hundred years later — we still haven’t learned not to fall for this kind of tech boosterism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/books/chapters/the-flickering-mind.html
#tech #education #film
"I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system," Thomas Edison said in 1922, "and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. I should say that on the average we get only about two percent efficiency out of textbooks as they are written today." A decade earlier, Edison had been even more pedagogically expansive, saying that film makes it "possible to touch every branch of human knowledge." Now he added: "The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture, a visualized education, where it should be possible to obtain one hundred percent efficiency." Three years later, Edison's vision was undiluted: "In ten years textbooks as the principal medium of teaching will be as obsolete as the horse and carriage are now.... There is no limitation to the camera."
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