The Children Must Learn

This 1940 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation film, shot in stark black-and-white, follows a poor mountain family in a drafty shack, surviving on corn pone and pork grease. Mournful music underscores their hunger as a pregnant mother cooks and kids face rickets from poor land and diet. Narrated with somber urgency, it critiques irrelevant schoolbooks, advocating education in crop rotation, goat milking, and reforestation to break cycles of poverty. A slow, sad plea for practical learning, it targets the children to heal a worn-out heritage.