Frederik Herman

The school desk: from concept to object

In the authors’ aim to go beyond the ‘silent’ school desk they returned to sources such as public contracts, photographs, advertising leaflets and (the often neglected) patents kept in the municipal archives of Brussels. In this article, they focus on the first half of the twentieth century and two phases of the ‘life‐cycle’ of the school desk, namely the design phase on the one hand and the production phase on the other hand. What desks were designed and by whom (cf. patents)? Which desks were effectively produced for use in the municipal schools of Brussels? The transition between these two phases – the place where only some designs were brought to ‘life’ – occupies a special place. The paper concludes with a case study on the school furniture of Oscar Brodsky, a designer who kindled the authors’ interest through his publicity campaign of the 1920s and 1930s.

About Pedagogization: From the Perspective of the History of Education

For history researchers, it is not a needless luxury to consider from time to time the content and the significance of the basic concepts they use, certainly if they have the ambition to interpret and/or explain history in addition to purely describing it. This self-reflection, compelled by the annually recurring dialogue with educational philosophers (cf. Smeyers & Depaepe, 2006),2 need not necessarily place an emphasis on philosophical abstraction but can just as well start from an examination of the history of one’s own research. Such an approach need not succumb to navel-gazing. Instead, such historical self-reflection possibly points to the creeping (and thereby largely unconscious) shifts in meaning that accompany various fashions (consider the swirling ‘turns’ of recent years), which affect the social scientific vocabulary (historiographic, philosophical, pedagogical, psychological sociological, etc.). By rendering such developments explicit, the epistemological wrestling with the stream of experiences we call ‘history’, a process that can be chaotic, may in the future perhaps be somewhat less sloppy. Admittedly, even the most critical concepts that emerged from our own work (which is discussed here) were not always used with methodological care and/or theoretical purity.

Forging harmony in the social organism: industry and the power of psychometric techniques

This article analyses the initiating role of the steel industry in educational selection by means of psychometric techniques used in the psycho-physiological laboratory associated with a vocational school in Luxembourg founded in 1914. It first considers the origins of, and initial meanings bestowed upon, this first (and perhaps also last) Luxembourg Laboratory of Psychophysiology. Second, it investigates whether and, if so, to what extent psychometric techniques developed in this laboratory for vocational orientation were used strategically to foster an ethic of individual harmony by means of objectified observation and categorisation of the aptitude. What hidden agendas underpinned the industry’s rhetoric regarding the rebirth of the individual and the empowerment of personal vocation through science-oriented processes like quantification, measurement and rational assessment? Did such rhetoric legitimise the industry’s self-image as a privileged force in structuring the social fabric as well as individual lives?

Adventures in cultural learning

An inspiring interview with Jennifer Miller, conducted by Tessa Overbeek, about Circus Amok, a New York City-based circus-theatre company which Miller founded in 1989, provides a very good insight into what we would like to call a contemporary adventure in cultural learning.1 The playwright, director, juggler, dancer, stilt walker, fire eater, and teacher of performance courses at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, as Overbeek describes Miller, wanted to provide free public art while simultaneously creating a local public platform, tailored to the city, to address contemporary needs and urgent sociocultural issues – public housing, urban planning, immigration, unequal rights for minorities, police violence, public health care, and education policies. Overbeek describes accurately how acrobatic performance fuses with politically engaged debate on the stage:

Envisioning the industrial present: pathways of cultural learning in Luxembourg (1880s–1920s)

Abstract This article examines how and to what extent Luxembourg society was “exposed” to visual representations of the prospering steel industries and labour and working-class culture(s) from the 1880s until the 1920s – a period of massive industrialisation – and how it thus gradually “learned to labour”. Indeed, modern visual media were seen as ideal catalysts for the circulation, transmission, and production of meaning, since they were considered to be appealing, objective, direct, and capable of inspiring the imagination. The article takes the reader through various mundane moments and events of industrial enculturation (annual funfair, slide lecture, vocational school, etc.) and engages with different “technologies of display” (photographs, fair albums, postcards, scale models, etc.) that subtly calibrated, conveyed, and inculcated the new industrial reality “through the eye” and, in the process, (re)produced national identifications. By zooming in on these different “visual encounters” with industry and by bringing these isolated encounters together in one story, the article (re)constructs a “learning route” – one among many possible pathways through this huge dynamic field of learning resources (or, “cultural ecology”) – and thus suggests how (informal) “cultural learning” might have taken place at the time. While accompanying us on this journey, the reader gains insights into how this field of resources evolved and how the industrial present was (re)framed, visually performed, and (re)configured over time.

Body_Machine? Encounters of the Human and the Mechanical in Education, Industry and Science

Abstract This paper unveils the body_machine as a key element of dynamic mental maps that have come to shape both educational praxis and research. It traces and analyses instances in which the human and the mechanical encountered each other in metaphorical, material and visual forms, thereby blurring to some extent the boundaries between them while capturing and mobilising specific forms of knowing and acting. The paper studies, first, how certain ‘orienting frames of reference’ and associated ‘experimental systems’ managed to materialise around the body_machine and penetrate theory and praxis; and, second, what visual and textual sources related to a vocational school may reveal about where and how the body_machine has come to operate in education, industry and science. The paper centres on early twentieth-century photographs and analyses these not only as media presenting, representing and interrogating common thought and practice but also as agents of meaning-making around the body_machine.