The March of Time: The Teachers’ Crisis

Overview

The Teachers’ Crisis (MARCH OF TIME) puts the pointer on one of the biggest U.S. problems—education. By narrative, charts and acted episodes, the film dramatizes the fact that, with public school enrollments bigger than ever before, and constantly growing, the U.S. has fewer public-school teachers than it had in 1939. Of these teachers many are pitifully ill-trained “emergency” amateurs. (The film shows the too common spectacle of a teacher unable to work a problem she has given students.) Still others are psychologically unfit to teach (the film shows a stupid teacher calling a pupil stupid).