I haven’t had this much fun with a book in quite some time
I first heard about this book, which chronicles the many hundreds of classroom educational films produced from the late 1940s through about 1970, on a podcast about the evolution of the American teenager, and I tracked down a copy at a used book sale. Used copies are readily available online, and if you have even the slightest interest in independent filmmaking, ephemeral films, or retro pop culture, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
You know these educational films from their endless parodies on The Simpsons, usually starring Troy McClure, or featured appearances on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But you probably don’t know the people responsible for making these movies, the reasons they became so prevalent, and the way in which, taken as a whole, they chronicle almost the entire postwar American experiment.
Ken Smith profiles hundreds of these films, along with the individuals and companies responsible for making them. But beyond that, Smith weaves this information into a broader story told with a lot of insight and humor. In fact, the longest section of the book is a catalogue of hundreds of titles with blurbs about each of them. When I first got my copy, I figured I’d read the narrative chapters and probably skip the catalogue, or just look at it as a reference source. Instead, Smith’s descriptions were so entertaining and in many cases the choices the films made were so bizarre that I found myself reading the whole thing, and often subjecting my family to the descriptions after I broke up laughing while reading on the couch.
At the time this book was written, these films were not available to the public. Smith combed university archives and relied on the assistance of icons in the film preservation field like Rick Prelinger to screen these films privately and subsequently write about them. Thankfully for big ol’ nerds like me, many of these films are now available on YouTube or archive.org. I put together a playlist if you want to dive in.
Classroom Social Guidance Films
During World War II, the U.S. government relied heavily on filmmaking for the first time to aid in the war effort. Famously, directors like Frank Capra and William Wyler left Hollywood to create pro-Allied propaganda films. Disney and Warner Bros. also contributed cartoons that had some type of training angle or rallied viewers to the cause. The government realized that you could train thousands of soldiers all at once, all across the globe, by showing them a film. The military produced a ton of films on different topics, and one of the most widely seen was Sex Hygiene, directed by John Ford and starring George Reeves of the Superman TV show fame, educating servicemen about how to not get syphilis.
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| 1943 Collier's cartoon |
Immediately after the war, progressive educators saw an opportunity to use this same idea to benefit kids in school. My cursory understanding of these films before reading the book was that they were a method for enforcing conformity across society, but the truth is far more complex.
Smith breaks up the bulk of Mental Hygiene into three sections: The Genres, The Producers, and The Films.
The Genres include Fitting In, Cautionary Tales, Dating, Girls Only, Drugs, Sex Education, Bloody Highways, and Sneaky Sponsors. Each genre contains a spectrum from “kinda good” to “mostly ok” to “wow, that’s cringe” to “oh no” to “what the hell did I just watch??”
The Drugs and Bloody Highways categories are the most likely to make your skin crawl. Many of the anti-drug films, which really emerged in the 1960s, rely on exploitative scare tactics and have almost no relation to the reality of drug use. Seduction of the Innocent, for instance, claims that marijuana is a powerful hallucinogenic. That movie’s 11 minutes of full-on batshit crazy. The Bloody Highways collection, which famously scarred generations of drivers-ed students by including real footage of mutilated bodies at accident scenes, is worse. These films remain grisly and disgusting – they are essentially snuff films – and Smith references other reporting that suggests that the producers of these films were giving kickbacks to police and ambulance companies to get out to accident scenes first, and that larger bribery and corruption scandals arose out of those arrangements.
I expected the “Fitting In” and “Dating” categories to be oppressive in their encouragement of rigid conformity, and some of that is definitely there (Control Your Emotions essentially advocates not having any emotions), but I found something else that I didn’t expect – actual good advice.
Isolation, a lack of community, and difficulties making meaningful connections plague our current moment, here in 2025. I have heard countless people online and in person talk about the challenges of just knowing what to do in social situations. What’s expected on a date? Should you pay for your date, or no? Is sex expected, or no? How do you make friends? How do you keep them? What do healthy relationships look like? Check the YouTube comments on a number of these social guidance films, and you’ll find modern viewers relating to the feelings of these characters and taking comfort in the fact that people have always had these social anxieties.
In Shy Guy, a young Dick York (later of Inherit the Wind and Bewitched) plays a high school student in a new town who loves tinkering with radios and doesn’t know how to make new friends. His father suggests just going to where other students hang out, not making a big deal of it or putting too much pressure on himself, but just putting himself out there where it’s at least possible to meet people. So Dick heads to the hang out at the malt shop or wherever, and watches how people interact. He notices that the people who have the most friends seem to be good listeners, ask questions, and take a sincere interest in other people. This is still good advice. If you meet a new person, you’re much more likely to grow that relationship by asking questions and listening to them than by plowing over them and talking about yourself the whole time.
Other social guidance films, like More Dates for Kay, take this too far. Kay basically knows everything about everybody and constantly reminds every other student she sees about their upcoming tests or doctor’s appointments and everything else, to the complete elimination of her own personality, or any personal wants or needs. So don’t be like Kay. But Dick York thinks everybody will laugh at him fixing radios, until he’s at a party and overhears another kid talking about building a radio. The 1950s didn’t have language for “finding your people,” but that’s basically what Dick does in Shy Guy.
The moral of other films is sometimes totally inscrutable. My daughters and I watched Are You Popular? in which all the boys have gone out with Jenny and so they think she’s a tramp, but they’re all also going out with Caroline every night, and she’s great. We were unable to determine a difference between Jenny and Caroline, or why Caroline wound up at the dance and Jenny wound up standing by a bus bench crying one perfect tear.
Before the rise of the anti-drug scare films, these social guidance films were intended to be a progressive resource for kids, providing them with a framework for understanding expectations in new situations. In the postwar economic boom, millions of Americans were moving from rural to suburban communities, many families had stable economic resources for the first time, and the rise of the automobile and commuter culture were changing the fabric of society. These films were an effort to help kids adapt to new environments, and some actually managed to do so successfully. Some less so. Like Cindy Goes to a Party, where little Cindy’s fairy godmother comes to her in a dream with tips for how to behave at her first party at a friend’s house, including the rock-solid advice, “Don’t Break Things,” which is optically printed onscreen when Cindy looks at a lamp that she presumably would’ve been fine with breaking.
Recontextualizing Conformity
However much fun I had reading this book, though, I don’t want to gloss over the actual, profound effect it had on me and my broader understanding of America in the 20th century. I have always had an appreciation for both educational and marketing films of the 1950s. Animated educational films from production companies such as John Sutherland (Destination Earth, Rhapsody in Steel, A is for Atom) were produced in partnership with commercial firms and industry groups, while companies like General Motors (Design for Dreaming) made consumerist fantasies designed to sell housewives on new kitchen technology and commuters on the latest automobiles.
These films were stylistically adventurous, especially the animated ones, and provide a truly unique time capsule of a period where innovation was happening rapidly, and the American middle class was exploding in size. Against the backdrop of the dawning Cold War, the films equate the ideas of American patriotism with being a good consumer, and promise a future of ease and contentment. But until Mental Hygiene, I never fully realized that classroom social engineering films were a distinct category, separate from the types of industrial/educational films I was already familiar with. And it’s the story of these mental hygiene films that really allowed me to recontextualize much of my understanding of the 1950s.
For many people, the prevailing impression of the 1950s that lingers today is one of forced conformity. The image of the nuclear family – the breadwinner father, the homemaker mother, the two clean-cut kids staying out of trouble and getting good grades – is central to the iconography of the era. For too many people, that iconography is the only thing they know of the time. This leads to a misguided sense that “everything was better” in the 1950s – that it was an ideal time we should harken back to and try to somehow recapture. That misunderstanding (or willful misrepresentation) obscures several realities of life at the time (off the top of my head):
- The horrors of segregation and the Jim Crow South
- Polio
- The Red Scare
- The Lavender Scare
- The forced exclusion of almost everyone but white men from the workforce
- The extraordinary prevalence of alcoholism and emergence of medications in pill form (and subsequent rise of both acceptable – “Mother’s Little Helper” (Valium) to help women forced to stay in the home battle anxiety – and unacceptable – teen – drug abuse)
- The untold levels of trauma in World War II veterans who had returned home
- The collapse of extended family support networks as large corporations began relocating workers to brand new communities around the country
- The unbelievable amount of death caused by motor vehicles that had yet to implement safety protocols, and
- The creeping cultural anxiety of the Cold War and possible nuclear holocaust.
But the successes of the New Deal and the defeat of global fascism (…at the time) created a sense of open horizons and limitless possibilities. Social guidance classroom films played a part in that and presented an opportunity for educators to try to build a better educational system that benefited the children and broader society, as well. The origin of these social guidance films was rooted in progressive education, and an anti-fascist focus on community. These films were largely good-faith efforts to help kids and reinforce a community-centric worldview that had helped defeat the fascist threat in Europe.
But here’s the rub: without anyone realizing it, the world had already moved on.
The people who were making the films – the writers, directors, and educational consultants – had endured all of that history…but the kids had not. These children, the Baby Boomers, were born into maybe the greatest economic upswing in human history, but at school they were being preached a wartime-rationing way of being in the world when it was no longer necessary and General Motors was telling them that to be good Americans they had to be good consumers.
Even the projectors themselves were products war. The armed forces had pioneered the practice of using films to train thousands of soldiers quickly. The projectors in school classrooms used to play these social guidance films had been used first to train soldiers, and then given to the schools as war surplus. This gave progressive educators what they thought was a golden opportunity to teach kids using these same, industrialized approaches.
Then many of these kids came of age into a draft and multiple, new foreign wars. They'd grown up told by a cartoon turtle to hide under their desks in case the Soviets dropped a nuclear bomb on their town. They were being taught pro-social messages and told that if they followed these rules, they’d be happy, well-adjusted, and they’d fit in. But why? To grow up a drunk like dad, or take Valium like mom, or go fight Koreans and Vietnamese who never did anything to them?
Traffic Safety films blamed teenagers for the massive fatalities on the road, when it had far more to do with a lack of basic safety features in cars, paired with increasingly powerful engines in vehicles built by manufacturers that didn’t - any of them - have a safety department. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed did what no scare-all classroom film could do – it got Congress to mandate safety features in cars. Only then did traffic fatalities begin to decline. In 1951, the rate of vehicle fatalities per 100 million miles driven was over 7. Since 1991, it's never been above 2. Yet teens had to watch films like Last Date (another Dick York role) that shared the concept of “teenicide,” where kids kill themselves before they can turn twenty by driving recklessly. It’s all your fault, kids!
Sponsored films were sneaky, although sometimes playing an important role. Tampon manufacturers were the only ones willing to make menstruation films, which was a positive, but they did so while promoting their own branded products. Many other companies produced pro-consumer propaganda films hoping schools would show them as educational films and not notice or not mind the product placements. Jam Handy, who was possibly the most prolific producer of these kinds of films, said they were intended “for people whose minds are to be reconditioned.” Oof.
I have to believe that the teenagers of the 1950s and 60s saw through this. The counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s seems inevitable as a reaction to the forced conformity of the 1950s that definitely was emphasized. But learning about these films showed me it’s also possible that the rebellion stemmed also from a generational divide, with parents and children talking past each other against the backdrop of unprecedented economic abundance and ever-intensifying cultural inequality and uncertainty.
The 1950s Indict the 1950s
With all this longing for the halcyon 1950s being so popular these days, it’s valuable to ask what folks in the 1950s thought about all that.
Two films stand out. The first is 1955's The Sound of a Stone, directed by Herk Harvey for Centron Pictures in Lawrence, Kansas. Harvey made hundreds of films for Centron, but is best remembered for directing the ghost story film Carnival of Souls. A careful reading of Carnival of Souls reveals a male director and male screenwriter working in 1962 acutely aware of the hazards young women faced. In the film, Mary begins to experience frightening visions, but they are in some ways depicted as less menacing than the reckless challenges of drag-racing boys on the road, the advances of her aggressive male neighbor, or the powerlessness she experiences as a church organist under the gaze of the pastor, who can throw her out of the congregation and rob her of her livelihood simply for playing the wrong music. I think Harvey picked up this sensitivity by making films for young people in a deeply troubled time.
In The Sound of a Stone, a young English teacher
assigns a book to his class, but when a student’s father discovers
the name of the book on a list of “subversive titles,” the English teacher and
his wife begin suffering under a reign of terror from the community. Soon, even
students who worked with the teacher on the school paper are also swept up, and
they begin receiving threats. It isn’t commented on, but one of the actors has
a severe limp in the film – most likely the result of Polio (see above). Soon
the boy’s father actually reads the book he was so quick to condemn, and stands
up at a school board meeting and recants. He does the right thing, and
everybody learns their lesson about blind censorship the Un=American
Activities Committee the McCarthy hearings jumping to conclusions.
Or so it seems, until the final scene in the movie when somebody else throws a
brick through the teacher’s window, almost hitting his infant son, and letting
them know that they’d still better leave town. It remains a genuinely
compelling film today, but it’s not uplifting.
Then there’s 1959's What About Prejudice? In this film, none of the other students like the new kid – Bruce Jones. They accuse him of stealing things they misplace, or of starting fights, and attribute his behavior to “his kind,” an idea their parents all reinforce. But then two of the gang crash their car into a bridge, and the only witness to the accident is Bruce, who receives horrible burns all over his body while rescuing the two other kids. This causes the gang to rethink their blind hatred of Bruce, and reflect on how maybe they should’ve looked at Bruce as a person first, and not just as a member of a group they didn’t like. Here’s the conceit of the film, though – as much as Bruce is clearly presumed to be Black, the filmmakers intentionally never show him, so that the audience can insert Bruce into their own personally disfavored group. Maybe Bruce isn’t Black. Maybe he’s Jewish. Or Catholic. Or Hispanic. Or any kind of immigrant. Hell, maybe Bruce just has long hair. The film chooses not to say. The fact that in 1959 the producers of an educational film about prejudice for high schools intentionally didn’t show the object of that prejudice so the audience could fill up that mental space with any number of widespread societal hatreds is itself a horrible indictment of the society that produced it.
Mental Hygiene? Five stars, good book, very fun, thought-provoking.
The 1950s? One-star, would not go back.
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Posted by Vance K - co-founder and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Sometime public service announcement and educational film professional.
