WASHINGTON — The breaking point for Perry Schwartz comes on Day 5 of the American Film Institute's three-week Summer Movie Production Workshop. Schwartz, director of the course, is helping students envision the movie they are making together.

They sit in folding chairs and speak in strictly visual terms, citing specific actors and moments in cinema.

"He's more like Jack Black."

"That happens in 'Space Jam'!"

Of the 10 students, one is 40; the rest are college age or younger.

Schwartz is describing how the two main characters in the student film will sit on a couch, simultaneously reach for popcorn and inadvertently touch hands, when Kit Reiner and Max Simon — both 18 — cry out, "Just like in 'Lady and the Tramp'!"

And Schwartz could take it no more. "Stop!" he yells.

"Try to think less about which movie scene you are reminded of and more about the way people really act in real life. Everything isn't related to a movie!"

Really?

To most of the workshop students, life has become totally visual. They are members of the Eye Generation.

"I really don't like reading a story. I like seeing it," student Craig Patterson, 17, says. "Movies can capture the beauty of an image more than books can."

It's no surprise that television, movies and video games have changed the way many absorb information. Now teachers are trying to harness that energy of the eye. This visually oriented generation "acquires much more of their knowledge — some studies estimate that acquisition as 50 percent — from visual texts" than from written sources, says Kathy Krauth, who is working on the Visualizing Cultures project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Therefore, she says, the Eye Generation "feels more comfortable expressing themselves in visual form."

Examples are endless. Vacation snapshots, collegians-gone-wild party pix and everything else go straight from a handycam or cell-phone camera to the Internet. Through YouTubing, Facebooking, MySpacing and myriad other ways, people take in vast amounts of visual information. But do they always comprehend its meaning?

That's the problem, says Krauth, who teaches at the American School in Japan. Students are taught how to read and how to react critically to literature, but not about visual images.

Because visual literacy is not required in schools, she says, "this generation's ability to assign meaning to the visual texts of others is passive and still needs a great deal more work. They are easily manipulated as students, consumers and citizens."

In other words, students need to be re-taught how to think critically.

Krauth says teachers must understand that students today receive most information through images and should teach them how to be discerning of those images. "We should lean into the reality of this generation," she says, "and construct meaningful lessons using visuals."