Who Will Teach Your Child?
1948 · 30m · Canada
Directed by Stanley Jackson
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
A classroom documentary contrasts how teachers shape young children, showing the effect on pupils of an impatient, short-tempered instructor versus teachers who guide their imaginations with patience.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a PSA pretending to be cinema—earnest pedagogical argument dressed up in observational clothing, the kind of thing that makes you nod at the time and forget by Tuesday. Even for 1948, this is too invested in teaching the right lesson to bother with actual ambiguity.
Jackson's comparison structure is deceptively elegant: he lets the footage speak through juxtaposition rather than voice-over sermon, situating this squarely in the NFB's documentary tradition of moral clarity achieved through formal restraint. The patience to let a bad teacher's impatience indict itself—that's the mark of a curator's sensibility, not a polemicist's.
What makes this breathe is the decision to hold on the children's faces during the impatient teacher's scenes—not as victims in need of rescue, but as small observers registering something real. That single commitment to their perspective over the adults' rhetoric is what keeps this from collapsing into finger-wagging.