Throughout the nineteenth-century, in Europe and in the United States, object lessons invaded the classroom, very much influenced by Johann Pestalozzi pedagogies, being configured as one path to construct knowledge through sense-training, and giving rise to a whole materiality in education, which produced educational objects and toys as part of learning commodities. The objects, being images or material objects, as part of a sensorial education were assumed as having the power to teach children unfamiliar concepts (Carter 2010). As pointed out by Sengupta (2003), the rationale of object lessons and sense-training also traveled into the colonies and produced differentiations between kinds of people in relation to the capacity of learning. By introducing the child to an object (or the picture of an object), it was presupposed that the child would achieve a higher stage of an idea. Within this thought was the differentiation between the child and the adult. The child, experiencing the object through the senses, would be conducted by the adult in the process of reasoning about the world. The developmental reasoning was implicit in this way of learning, in which the child, as the ‘primitive’, would follow the path of learning from the simple to the complex. A hierarchy was implied in terms of the differentiation between the body and the mind, but also in terms of reasoning.
The place of images in children’s education was very soon understood as a pharmakon, potentially good but also potentially dangerous. Too many images could trigger an excessive imagination, but the ‘right’ images could lead to a moral character.
C.M.