The Growing Use of the Cinematic Medium as a Tool for Educating the Masses on Relevant Social Issues and Conventions

Abstract

This paper explores how cinema, originally a medium of entertainment, has evolved over the course of the 20^th and 21^st-centuries into a potentially new vehicle for educating the masses on era-specific social issues and conventions. Because of its foundation as a tool for spreading easily-digestible social commentary, the development of cinema into an educational tool has been a topic of interest for several decades, dating back to the early 1900s and continuing well into the modern era. By examining the beginnings of how the general public and filmmakers came to perceive films as a possible method of education, one can better understand the current trajectory of cinema development for these purposes and the direction in which this development may be headed. Within the context of 21^st-century society, the breadth of topics that will be explored include how cinema appeals to different social hierarchies, addresses modern social issues, explores unique moral and ethical questions, and overall stands as an additional, valid pedagogical field. Due to cinema’s easily-digestible nature and the ever-evolving methods that it is utilizing to convey information about these topics to consumers – especially modern-day adolescents and young adults in European countries – it is possible that it could be used to improve educational quality for future generations.