Towards an Emotional and Experiential History of Modern Education: Children’s Essays on the Cinema Around the First World War

Abstract

This article probes the potential of emotional and experiential histories of education. London children’s school essays on their experiences in the First World War, their stories, their dreams and especially their favourite films, commissioned by C.W. Kimmins, Chief Inspector of Schools for the London County Council, are the main source base. Kimmins was primarily interested in children’s “attitude to life” and in adapting pedagogical methods accordingly. Through his own studies and through his participation in The Cinema Commission Inquiry (1917, 1925), changing pedagogical and psychological understandings of children are detailed. What about children themselves? What can such mediated sources tell us about children’s understandings of the new medium of the cinema, their outer and inner worlds, and their emotions, senses and experiences in wartime? They provide a base to ask novel questions of children’s experiences with education, and more profoundly, of their mediated experiences of the worlds around them.