The timetable of primary schools is to a great extent filled with the arts of reading and writing, and evidently children need many hours to learn how to use their abilities for these in fact very intricate skills. However, almost nowhere is the art of observing part of the timetable, and in fact not one hour is really reserved for that equally difficult subject. Nevertheless, especially since modern civilisation sometimes includes hours of looking at the television set daily, it would be better to teach children at a young age how to get on with pictures and how to handle them with the same skill that they are taught to use when reading a book or writing a letter.

Especially for the student in contemporary history, the lack of training in how to look at pictures is a handicap now that film documents are part of his sources and television will be of ever more importance. If only because of the lack of a more basic education in this field, it will be necessary to train future undergraduates in the faculty of history in how to work with film and other audio-visual media and to give them an opportunity to acquire what Professor Thorold Dickinson described as ‘a sense of what I can only call cinemacy’ (Screen Digest, September 1973, p. 135).

In fact the ‘traditional’ historian is very well acquainted with ‘cinemacy’ when it is a question of written documents. A critical approach, not restricted to the surface of the source but going also into the background and the political, social and economic context of the document, is basic for his work.