[7] Challenging questions or debate over social issues are also raised in educational films, such as labor reform, communism, civil rights, and nuclear proliferation.
One of these was "An Educational Film on Land Reform," which examined the question "Why is building enough housing for everyone difficult, when everyone agrees it is needed?"
For example, educational films can be used in the teaching of architectural subjects, giving a tour of a structure without needing to bring the students to it physically.
Similarly, when teaching a complex principal, such as cell division, a loop of video can demonstrate the processes involved as many times as the students need.
By 1950, prominent educational film institutions like New York University's Educational Film Library, Columbia Teachers College, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) believed that documentaries intended for children, such as A Better Tomorrow (1945), Tomorrow's a Wonderful Day (1948), and The Children's Republic (1947), were suitable for adult audiences interested in teacher training, child care and development, and even the rehabilitation of so-called delinquents.
Both organized film divisions for the twofold purpose of supplying information to the public and of instructing officers and troops.
[13] Likewise, there were a large-scale introduction of audio-visual media in schools and an expansion of the non-theatrical film circuit during the Second World War.
With the rise of social media, both corporations (such as PBS) and private individuals post a wide variety of educational videos to sites like YouTube.
Filmmakers often included insights into the makeup of the country beyond the locations and basic statistics, describing cultures politically, socially, and economically.
It helped students and professors study anthropology, as it showed real-life footage of local events and daily life.
Typically, historical films from before the 1960s defaulted to a white, conservative, Christian perspective, such as Ray Garner's Ancient World: Egypt (1954) and Greece: The Golden Age (1963).
In other films, characters meant to be seen as civilized or sympathetic where played by white actors, while non-whites were cast in less desirable roles, if at all.
Such filmmakers largely left out the roles African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and women, focusing instead on wealthy industrialists or the Founding Fathers of the United States.
In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers began to take advantage of the movie camera to capture the visual art in new ways, such as moving around a sculpture while filming it.
Educational film companies in the United States began acquiring dramatic content from sources overseas in the 1950s.
They were commonly from France, which included several well-known non-narrated short dramas, director Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon (1956) among them.
Many schoolchildren in Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s watched hundreds of episodes of British-made educational films (all very similar in style and production) over the course of their primary school careers.
[21][22] Research also examines the idea that cognitive overload may occur because the viewer has to process audio and visuals at the same time.