Salute Your Shorts: How to Become a Man/Woman in Educational Short Films

One of the most neglected (for a good reason) genres of film is educational shorts. In a nutshell: They’re pretty terrible. There is, at least, one exception, and that's Jean Painleve’s absurdist attempts at mixing science with art. Other than that, though, it’s a pretty dry well. The genre is just so limiting that even the most ambitious ideas have a hard time breaking away from nattering on about right and wrong to uninterested middle-school students. Which is probably what they’re supposed to do, but that doesn’t do much to make you want to watch them during your spare time.

Still, while there’s an obvious dearth of quality in educational films, there’s certainly no shortage as far as quantity is concerned. A/V Geeks, who helped Kino out in releasing the How to Be a Man and How to Be a Woman this week, reports owning over 22,000 of these works, while still being far from finished with their collection. It’s hard to know where to even start, which is part of why the release is so helpful. Just online, the Geeks have hundreds of films available, with frequently apocryphal, though hilarious, names that make it difficult to browse. There’s a reason the curators of this odd field of films call themselves “geeks.”

Everyone is familiar with the genre in some capacity, but for a lot of us this comes not from the films themselves but rather from parodies. The Simpsons in particular had a way with them, perhaps because of a certain Homer Groening whose son enjoys taking jabs at his father’s works. By the time anyone under 30 hit school, educational films had largely been relegated to the past and replaced with rudimentary computers as the laziest method of teaching available in classrooms. The true heyday of these shorts was the '50s and '60s, when a cottage industry for them arose in Chicago and began chugging them out for schools, the military, and perhaps above all, advertisers. But more on that in a second.

One of the main purposes of the films, early on, wasn’t just to give overworked teachers a break, though; it was to deal with topics that they didn’t want to handle. Puberty, for instance, is pretty awkward to talk through with anyone, let alone someone you need to later grade on a math quiz. How to Be a Man/Woman cover these changes thoroughly, from “Your Body During Adolescence” to “You’re Growing Up” to, though in a somewhat baffling manner, “The Wonders of Reproduction.” Each one deals with the icky subject through factual narration and a vaguely conservative viewpoint on the world. Just because they’re going to talk about sex doesn’t mean they have to be frank about it.

But as noted by A/V Geeks founder Skip Elsheimer, the very fact the films addressed the subject of human sexuality at all was pretty daring. Sure, they may not go into much detail as far as sex itself is concerned (ok, none at all), but by pointing out that it’s going on at all the films ended up controversial. The government’s view that children not being taught these essential lessons were a social problem is a view that often wasn’t shared by parents. Oddly enough, one of the shorts itself lampoons this idea, when a mother explains in “Dance Little Children” that her child wouldn’t have even thought about sex if it hadn’t been taught in schools. Oh, the ‘50s.

Somewhat stifling explanations of sex are a good hook into these shorts, but far more interesting than those obligatory lessons are what else was considered essential. My favorite short contained on either disc is “Let’s Make a Sandwich,” which is nothing less than explaining to girls, well, how to make a sandwich. Fascinatingly sexist, its inherent message that this is a key job of women makes for both bafflement and laughter, not to mention disgust. But it’s just so entrancingly disgusting that it’s hard to look away or not follow it up with the equally repulsive “Why Study Home Economics?” The camp factor in these things is so high they need their own scale to even be measured.

The male equivalent of these female shorts that stress the importance of home economics, cooking, and sewing is the fascination male-targeted films had with subjects like car theft. Both “Moment of Decision” and the creatively titled "Car Theft” seem to believe that given the slightest provocation any male teenager will grab the nearest car and take off without a care in the world. This is the first I’d heard of car theft as an especially large concern during the late '50s/early '60s, which points to the concerns of parents’ fears rather than children’s actions as the real cause for the films. Boys will be boys, suggests “Fears of Children,” but just don’t steal any cars.

Or maybe it doesn’t. “Fears of Children,” the first film on the male disc, sets down one of the other fascinating aspects of educational shorts. Despite how set in stone their lessons are, the films frequently digress or, in this case, get completely confused about what they’re trying to say. What begins as a lesson in giving children larger boundaries ends as a strange oedipal lesson in, well, the fact that children can be really creepy and wish to kill their fathers. There’s probably something else in there, too, but its 27 minutes get really off course in the second half in order to focus on just how creepy and weird that kid truly is.

The complexity of the lesson doesn’t seem to have much to do with the complexity of the film, either. “Dance Little Children’ focuses on a syphilis scare and showing how you probably shouldn’t hook up with women without at least learning their names first. That gives the film plenty of time to go into some odd places, in particular a club where the titular song, “Dance Little Children,” is being played, in a parallel commentary to the main plotline that completely fails to exist. The film ends with the song playing again, leaving with a message of, “Syphilis is bad, but don’t you think this song is catchy?”

One of the main surprises from these collections is just how wide-ranging, both stylistically and thematically, the films really are. Although nominally the same thing, a story told by the typically confused but conventional Centron (best-known for being perhaps the only educational short studio to create a feature film, the equally confused yet entrancing Carnival of Souls) bears little relationship to Douglas Film Ind.’s “Girls Are Better Than Ever,” which looks like a cross between an avant-garde film, an educational short and a student film. With a reliance on showy techniques and direct address to the camera, the film completely forgets its point several times—girls, it turns out, are better than previously thought—in order to show off some cool lighting effects and camera moves.

Especially in the girls films, one of the topics also ends up being how great it is to use whatever product is sponsoring the lesson. Because nothing says cool like being associated with a school lesson, “You’re the Judge” is less about learning how to bake and more about learning how much better Crisco is than, say, anything else ever made. Why exactly the dairy council would decide to commission a film about manners like “As Others See Us” is hard to fathom, but adds to the unintentional hilarity of things in a way that makes Demolition Man’s product placement look downright subtle.

The educational shorts contained are not good, but they are often surprisingly well-made if almost never well-written. But that’s not their point. They’re historical documents, showing us what we thought was important and how we thought things should be, even though their characters and situations bear little relationship with reality. That may not convince you of their worth, but even the most cold-hearted bastards among us will have a hard time stifling a laugh when the oldest teenager in the world turns on smooth jazz to convince the ugliest into having sex in “Saying No,” or learning how you shouldn’t get married at 15 in “Worth Waiting For.” As the shorts say, just as apropos of nothing, dance little children, dance.