The School (1940s)

"The School" is a roughly 14-minute educational film that reenacts how Jewish children were educated in the hill villages of Palestine about 2,000 years ago. It follows village boys from home to the elementary school held in the local synagogue. There they bow to the ark, recite the creed, and learn Hebrew scripture by rote from scrolls, repeating it after the schoolmaster. They also practice reading and writing right-to-left on wooden tablets, and a capable reader eventually reads before the Sabbath congregation while an interpreter renders the text into the everyday Aramaic. The film then shows scribes copying sacred scrolls by dictation. It moves on to the secondary school in the synagogue courtyard, where students are encouraged to argue over the meaning of texts until the rabbi settles the question. Further on are the "university" classes in the courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem. It closes in the home, where girls learn their letters from their mothers with charcoal on boards and families gather by the fire as the father reads from the treasured family scroll. It ends with a reading from Psalm 119. The narration's tone and phrasing ("a sort of paper," "then as now they forgot their coats") suggest a mid-century British classroom film made for young students.