It’s hard to decide what fact or what program makes the strongest case for the Jacob Burns Film Center and its commitment to education: the more than 40,000 students from public and private schools who have enrolled in one of the center’s educational courses, the high school students who have just returned from Uganda this month as a part of a Jacob Burns documentary program, or the specialized film-based curriculum for third-graders that has already been licensed and adopted by other art houses in the region.

Or perhaps the most convincing evidence of the center’s educational commitment is to be found in the $12 million media and education center that is currently being constructed just down the road, tentatively scheduled to open its doors next year. The new center, a 25,000-square-foot addition to the film center’s current facilities, is the physical embodiment of the organization’s core mission: to advocate and promote visual literacy.

Since opening in June of 2001, the film center — located within walking distance of the Metro-North train station in Pleasantville — more than 900,000 people from some 40 countries have seen over 2,000 films on one of its three screens. Contributingtothisnumber are some of the center’s students, who have had their in-class projects projected on the center’s big screen, as well as a sizable number of New Yorkers who hop the train and head north in hopes of seeing the various celebrities who have made Jacob Burns part of their regular press tours.

While most art houses have begun incorporating film education into their missions, Jacob Burns — which presents one-night and limited-run adult courses, usually taking the form of open lectures and lengthy sequence analyses, with a professional staff of 30 full-time employees and educators — takes the concept of film study to a whole new level.

“We think of it a bit differently,” the center’s executive director, Stephen Apkon, said. “It’s more than just film study. We were aware that media would play an increasingly important role in our lives. If you look over the past five or 10 years, it’s been happening at an increasingly accelerated rate — the information we receive on a daily basis through the visual media of TV, video, film, internet, blogs, cell phones. It redefines the notion of literacy, and what skills we all need to get through life.”

During the past six years, the film center has grown at a terrific pace, regularly adding faculty and curriculum to its extensive catalogue. Today, educator Katie Braun said the educational programs begin in third grade and continue up through high school, into college, and culminate in an array of adult-themed courses taught by visiting instructors. The third-grade program, which is poised to start its second year, is dubbed “See-Hear-Feel-Film,” a bilingual writing-based program that teaches children to think critically about what they watch. That course is followed by a fourth-grade program titled “Animation: Mind in Motion!” a 12-session in-house seminar that uses many of the principals of filmmaking and animation as a springboard for studies involving other subjects. Every year, the students’ animated shorts are screened at a gala Jacob Burns premiere; this year, that public screening is scheduled for September 19.

“There’s a point where students suddenly realize they are learning something, and that we are teaching them something,” Mr. Apkon said. “And it works every part of the curriculum; for science class, it’s all about how the eye works in perceiving animation and how we feel emotion; for math class, it’s all about how long it takes the character to walk across the screen, and then how many frames exist per second to create the illusion of movement.”

For middle school students there’s “Cinemania,” an afterschool club; for high school students there’s the competitive, byapplication-only “Unscripted” documentary program. In July, two different seminars were offered for area teachers, both designed to aid instructors in seeing how film and visual media can be incorporated into the classroom environment. Last but not least, there are scores of special programs and evening educational events aimed at adults, often involving the filmmaker Jonathan Demme, former New York Times film critic Janet Maslin (both members of the film center’s board), or Vicente Rodriguez Ortega, a film instructor at New York University. On September 11, Mr. Rodriguez will host another in a series of “Reel Talk” film events, using the 2004 Fatih Akin film “Head-On” as a primary text. He will also teach a three-part “Language of Film” course, scheduled to run between October and December.

In talking with Programming Director Brian Acker man, who travels the world’s festivals searching for new and exciting offerings, it’s clear that Jacob Burns’s film selection is as diverse as its educational offerings. Typically featuring a brand-new, first-run independent film every week — Laurent Tirard ‘ s “Molière” opens today — the film center staggers numerous special series and events around that title’s daily showtimes. A special festival focusing on the French new wave just wrapped up, while a Thursday series of opera films continues for two more weeks with “Tosca’s Kiss” and the rarely seen “Don Giovanni.” A Thursday Takashi Miike series concludes with “Ichi the Killer” next week and “The Happiness of the Katakuris” on August 30. On Wednesday, a special live poetry performance will accompany a screening of the documentary “Slam Planet,” which offers an inside look at the world of slam poetry. An additional slate of special series is already stacked up through the fall, including a schedule of baseball films and a modern German series.

But even in regard to the programming, there is an educational emphasis, not just in the sheer breadth of titles flowing through the film center on an annual basis — Mr. Apkon puts the number at around 450 — but in the diversity of the special series that spotlight different countries, subjects, and filmmakers. Yet while some might see the Jacob Burns Film Center as a trailblazer in the vernacular of visual literacy, Mr. Apkon is more reserved in his assessment, saying that educators are constantly struggling to keep education relevant in the face of everadvancing technology.

“I was asked to participate a year ago in the first-ever United Nations conference on education and the arts, and what was identified was that this idea of visual, or media, literacy is one of the most important educational issues of the next decade,” he said. “Whether the child lives in a penthouse in Manhattan or in a Mongolian desert, it’s a crucial issue. We all know that children need to learn how to listen and speak, how to read and write, but why is that literacy important? Because it’s how we communicate, and that form of communication is changing, and we need to find ways to keep up with my 8-year-old, who navigates the Web better than I do.”

ssnyder@nysun.com

DIRECTIONS Via train: Take Metro-North (Harlem Line) to Pleasantville. Go upstairs at the north end of the platform and exit to the right to the corner of Wheeler Avenue and Manville Road. The Film Center is on Manville Road one block to the right. For train schedules, call 800-638-7646.

Via car: Take Saw Mill Parkway north to Exit 30 (Grant St.), take Grant St. to the first light and turn right onto Manville Road. The Film Center is on the right after the next stoplight.