The archival documents around which this archive is being imagined, are two picture book series that were used as educational materials in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe. I study the picture books as technologies of schooling, that means that I study these educational objects not only in their visual, material and discursive making but also how they were involved in the production of a subject – namely that of the child (Lawn & Grosvenor, 2005).
Images and picture books as educational materials, in the manner that they are later employed in modern education, can already be found in the early 19th century. The teaching with and through images was closely linked to the education of the senses. Sensorial training became a pillar of educational reform approaches amongst European educators and while they often took recourse to the same texts and references such as Rousseau’s Emile or On Education and Pestalozzi’s work, the ideas manifested and transformed distinctly in the various contexts in which they were mobilized. This travelling of ideas and the cultural and epistemological logics that made this travel possible is what interests me (Popkewitz, 2005; Sobe, 2013). Particularly, I attempt to grasp the colonial and imperial conditions of those cultural and epistemological logics and how they played out “at home” in Europe; I try to articulate a critical history of arts education across Empire(s).
Object lesson method and its picture books
The so-called object lesson method was popular amongst reform educators who were invested in the education of the senses. In Portuguese we find the translations lições de coisas and ensino intuitivo – invoking both material learning and a notion of “intuition”. In German the corresponding concept of Anschauung and the deriving method of the Anschauungsunterricht conjure a similar articulation between the vivid and sensual qualities of materials, illustrative descriptions of those and the constructing of an inner sensibility – or intuition.
We come to understand that educating through images and materials was deeply entangled with notions of how senses and mind work together in the process of learning, on how experiences are being made. Various versions of the method and its practice manifested. Common to the different manifestations was that the child was supposed to develop through the sensorial – often visual – experience of objects. The sensorial input, correctly processed could lead to abstract and rational thinking as well as to moral and “well-tempered” emotional judgement.
Two key anchor concepts are crucial here: the idea of development and the role of “nature” in teaching. Pervaded by deep running contradictions which nevertheless did not hinder the proliferation of the idea, the theory of development was somewhat this: each child develops naturally in the right direction, yet it needs to be guided in this process, yet not too much as this would interfere with the course of nature. It was laid out a developmental path that led from the “primitive” to the abstract thinking, moral and rational man. The development of the individual child was compared or rather actively linked to the development of civilisations and races. Just as the child – attention: first and foremost the white, male, European child – developed from “primitive” to rational being, so would civilisations develop.
The concept of development has been critiqued for its universalising, Eurocentric and normative prescription of who is a subject and what this entails (Burman, 2017; Martins, 2022, 2022). Discriminating people of colour, indigenous populations, women, disabled people, queer folks, the poorer classes and, in fact, children by claiming their “natural” inferiority, the ideas of human development and the development of nations or races continue to inform much thinking today. “Nature” was not only employed as a universal law and as a normative tool to argue for the specific character of the child and by extension the human; it was precisely through the contact with “nature” – now used to describe a non-urban environment – that the correct development of the child was supposedly achieved.
The picture book series by Johann Staub
Johannes Staub (1813-1880) was a Swiss teacher and novelist who received his training as a teacher at the seminar in Küsnacht, today Zurich (Switzerland) between 1836-1839 under the directory of Ignaz Thomas Scherr. Scherr was a school reformer and gained a wider public presence when he published a set of curricula and textbooks in 1830. In 1832, he founded the teacher training seminar in Küsnacht and contributed a great deal to the reforming of the system of the Volksschule. After finishing his training, he taught for more than thirty years at a school in Fluntern (today part of Zürich, 1840-1874).
Staub became popular with the publication of small song and story books that he would give as Christmas presents to his students. Staub stood critical towards the existing songbooks that he found were promoting a dogmatic religious vision of Christianity and lacking in pedagogical value. Being confronted with the absence of alternative teaching materials Staub began to produce his own, more liberal in his religious commitment yet still decidedly promoting a Christian worldview.
In 1875/6, he then published his series of picture books consisting of four volumes. In 1873, Staub was awarded a prize for his songbooks at the Vienna World Fair. The World Fair included the forced exhibition of colonized persons and was a mode of reproducing colonial power. The World Fairs also were important nodes for knowledge exchange in the emerging educational field. The Schreiber Verlag was promoting its picture books at the fair and it is here that, Staub most likely got inspired for his own picture book series two years after in 1875/6. After Staub died in 1880 the series was extended by two more books.
The picture books were costly in production and went through the hands of several editors before the brothers Künzli managed to make it a successful product, and eventually translated the books into several languages.
In 1904/5 the first four volumes were adapted to Portuguese by Bernardo V. Moreira de Sá (1853-1924), João Diogo (1868-1923) and Gonçalo Sampaio (1865-1937), published by the editors Magalhães & Moniz, Porto. Thus far I have focused on the first two teachers. Moreira de Sá was an internationally renowned and widely travelled musician who greatly informed music education in Porto. He was a teacher and later the director of the Escola Nova in Porto. He had family, friendship relations and business contacts in Germany which makes his proficiency in the German language likely. He promoted particular German classic music and a rather traditionally minded notion of “taste”.
João Diogo opened one of the first so-called New Schools, in Portuguese “Escola Novas”. He had a profound knowledge of the reform educational theories that flourished in Europe in the late 19th century and kept in personal contact with Adolphe Ferriere – a prominent advocator of developmental theory. Diogo, like many reform educators in Portugal who came after him, implemented the teaching philosophy of Friedrich Froebel and the “Landerziehungsheim”-movement that was emerging strongly in Germany at the turn of the centuries (Landerziehungsheime were summer camps/houses in rural areas that were destined for the education of children, particularly during the holidays).
The German volumes:
Staub, Johannes. (1923a). J. Staub’s Bilderbuch. Anschauungsunterricht für Kinder mit Text. Ein Buch für Haus und Schule. (Vol. 1). Gebrüd. Künzli AG.
Staub, Johannes. (1923b). J. Staub’s Bilderbuch. Anschauungsunterricht für Kinder mit Text. Ein Buch für Haus und Schule. (Vol. 2). Gebrüd. Künzli AG.
Staub, Johannes. (1923c). J. Staub’s Bilderbuch. Anschauungsunterricht für Kinder mit Text. Ein Buch für Haus und Schule. (Vol. 3). Gebrüd. Künzli AG.
Staub, Johannes. (1923d). J. Staub’s Bilderbuch. Anschauungsunterricht für Kinder mit Text. Ein Buch für Haus und Schule. (Vol. 4). Gebrüd. Künzli AG.
Kollbrunner, Ulrich. (1923a). J. Staub’s Bilderbuch. Anschauungsunterricht für Kinder mit Text. Ein Buch für Haus und Schule. (Vol. 5). Gebrüd. Künzli AG.
Kollbrunner, Ulrich. (1923b). J. Staub’s Bilderbuch. Anschauungsunterricht für Kinder mit Text. Ein Buch für Haus und Schule. (Vol. 6). Gebrüd. Künzli AG.
The Portuguese volumes:
Staub, Johannes. (1904). A instrucção da creança. Album illustrado.: Vol. 1° caderno (B. V. Moreira de Sá, Trans.). Livraria Magalhães & Moniz - Editora.
Staub, Johannes. (1905a). A instrucção da creança. Album illustrado.: Vol. 2° caderno (João Diogo, Trans.). Livraria Magalhães & Moniz - Editora.
Staub, Johannes. (1905b). A instrucção da creança. Album illustrado.: Vol. 3° caderno (João Diogo, Trans.). Livraria Magalhães & Moniz - Editora.
The picture book series by Eduard Walther
Eduard Walther (1840-1908) edited several picture books that were all published by the editorial house J.F. Schreiber. The editorial house was one of the early producers of picture sheets and wall images for educational uses. Based in Esslingen, Stuttgart which lies in the Würtemberg region of Germany, the publishing house began as a printing shop and was run as a family business from its founding in ca. 1830 until at least the end of World War II.
The books, educational materials and later journals were popular in the German teaching community and discussed in several leading educational journals at the time. During my research at the company’s archive, now held by the Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, I found out that amongst many international relations, the editors underheld business with the Basel Mission in Mangalore, India. The orders of the missionaries also included books edited by Walther. Furthermore, letters, botanical illustrations and other educational materials were exchanged between the Basel mission which had its own printing press in Mangalore and the Schreiber editorial house.
Eduard Walther was the head of director of Royal Institution for the Deaf in Prussia, in Berlin, and published his educational theories and practices, amongst others the object lesson method and the concept of Anschauung.
Walther, Eduard. (1873). Bilder zum Anschauungsunterricht. Teil II: Gift- und Kulturpflanzen: Vol. II (5th ed.). J. F. Schreiber Verlag; DNB Leipzig.
Walther, Eduard. (1889). Bilder zum Anschauungsunterricht für die Jugend. Teil I.: Vol. I. J. F. Schreiber Verlag.
Walther, Eduard. (1891a). Bilder zum Anschauungsunterricht. Teil II: Tiere und Pflanzen.: Vol. II. J. F. Schreiber Verlag.
Walther, Eduard. (1891b). Bilder zum Anschauungsunterricht. Teil III: Geographische Charakterbilder.: Vol. III. J. F. Schreiber Verlag; DNB Leipzig.
Walther, Eduard. (1980). Bilder zum Anschauungsunterricht für die Jugend. Teil I. (Hubert Göbels, Ed.). Harenberg.