The Child of the Future: How Might He Learn
1964 · 58m · Canada
Directed by Theodore Conant
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Educators including Jerome Bruner and Marshall McLuhan examine how technology reshapes children's learning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1964 think-piece on pedagogy and media sounds like the opposite of subversive—until you realize Conant got McLuhan and Bruner on camera before anyone knew they'd reshape how we think about technology, making this feel less like documentation and more like accidental prophecy that refuses to pat itself on the back for it.
Conant's formal restraint—letting theorists articulate futures without editorializing, trusting essay-film conventions to carry philosophical weight—places this squarely in the lineage of mid-century pedagogical cinema, a work that rewards close viewing precisely because it refuses the easy seduction of its own prescience.
The decision to let Bruner and McLuhan speak in real time, uncut and unhurried, against a spare visual field, transforms what could've been a talking-heads slog into something hypnotic—the sound design of *thought itself* becomes the film's true subject.