My emphasis is on how the image of urban schools has changed over the time. Having said that, I will quickly add that I will not examine the three most common photographic genres which are very much the same today as they were in 1860: sports teams, graduation, and class photographs. In the modern world state education is charged with reproduction of social structures including beliefs and attitudes, political and socio-economic systems, and social stratifications (Durkheim 1961 [1925], Parsons 1959, Giroux 1983). Sports teams reproduce competition and cooperation; graduation is an essential element of the sorting and selecting process of social stratification; the end of term class photograph represents socialization, citizenship, and social bonding. These genres testify that school is one of the most conservative of social institutions, but while extremely resistant to change, it does change.

 

3. Nineteenth Century Images

A good place to begin this visual survey of urban schools is with a drawing from Harper’ weekly dated to the 1870’s [5]. It depicts an enormous auditorium. The body language 7 being depicted is best examined through a lens of symbolic interaction (Goffman, 1976). In front, a bearded male teacher stands with his finger on a bell. His raised desk allows him to see each of the students who sit at long benches like church pews. There are windows on both sides of the hall and on the back wall, which is decorated with an American flag and flag bunting. The students are all male and appear to be white and well-dressed; they all about the same age. They wear what today would be called sports jackets and ties or scarfs [6]. The action, the occasion for the drawing, is to demonstrate a fire drill. The students are exiting the rows to the right and left, they march single file toward exits at the front and back of the hall. Fire drills exemplify the Foucaldian sense of “discipline”: «These methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called “disciplines.”» (Foucault 1995:137).

The architecture of schools and school rooms, the design and alignment of desks, are additional examples of what Foucault termed the «little technologies of power.» In response to a tap on the bell, the main function of the action is the ceremonial performance of social order, conducted without thought in response to nearly imperceptible signals, a species of «dressage»” (Foucault 1995:166). In this way schools are special examples of Goffman’s «total institutions» the hallmarks of which were «mortifications of the self:» removal of personal possessions, loss of control over your schedule, uniforms, hair-cuts, and the inability to escape from organizational rules and procedures (Goffman, 1961). The institutional goal is to recreate the individual to fit the demands of the organization. The larger function of schooling the body is to shape the it to fit society not just the institution.

The built environment of the city and its attendant social institutions shaped the behaviors referred to as metropolitan or urban culture. While mass transport, high rise buildings, apartments and factories all played a part, schools were among the central institutions disciplining the mind and body. Images of urban schools depict the school in its material form and social organization, but also show how it shaped the kind of behaviors referred to by the educational historian Lawrence Cremin (1988) as «Metropolitanization,» the regimentation of the body and the personality by which schools sought to produce «urban persons.» Many images depict urban schools as highly regimented and disciplined. As Joseph Baldwin wrote in an 1897 book on school management: «When called to the board pupils await signals. At the signal «Board!» each pupil turns to the left. At the signal «attention!» each pupil faces to the right. At the signal «Erase!» the pupils turn to the board and erase by moving erasers down. At the signal «Write!» each pupil takes a crayon and proceeds as directed». (Baldwin 1897:176).

In lectures on moral education at the Sorbonne given in the 1890’s, Emile Durkheim described the social function of such practices: “It is by respecting the school rules that the child learns to respect rules in general, that he develops the habit of self-control and restraint simply because be should control and restrain himself. It is a first initiation into the austerity of duty” (Durkheim 1961 [1925]:149). Rows and files of pupils, age graded classrooms, established rhythms and cycles of behavior organized by clocks and bells are the little disciplines designed to domesticate the urban individual. Surveillance is provided by the watching teacher with his bell who assigns rank in the form of grades and rewards for performance. As Foucault explained: “the rhythm imposed by signals, whistles, orders imposed on everyone temporal norms that were intended both to accelerate the process of learning and to teach speed as a virtue… (Foucault 1995:154). With each drill, then, children were trained in the hidden curriculum of speed and efficiency and were being prepared to take their places in the metropolitan order.

Alongside the urban disciplines, one of the hallmarks of the metropolitan order is what we have come to call “diversity.” The city encompasses groups of many different races and ethnicities. As everybody knows, these groups are not evenly dispersed but clustered in what the sociologist Herbert Gans (1962) termed “Urban Villages.” Given the local “neighborhood” structure of school catchment areas, this meant (and continues to mean) that U.S. schools are distinctly segregated by race/ethnicity and social class. Thus most school photographs show homogeneous student bodies. But there are exceptions. Figure 2 depicts an ethnically diverse (but apparently homogeneous in terms of social-class) class of students; it comes from an album of nineteen class pictures from the elite San Francisco Girls’ High School taken in 1877. Not only are the young women extremely well-dressed, their teachers sit amongst them. The postures suggest an equality of position in distinction to the teacher’s position in figure 1. Graduates were admitted without examination to the University of California or Stanford University. The school offered three courses of study: Scientific, Latin Scientific, and Classical; the building was equipped with laboratories, an assembly hall, and an art department. Graduates could go on to university or complete the normal course that offered teaching certificates (San Francisco ND).

The crusading Danish American newspaperman and photographer, Jacob Riis, is most well-known today for haunting the back alleys and tenements of New York City with a camera and pan of magnesium flash powder. Many of his photos were reproduced in How the Other Half Lives (Riis 1971 [1890]). One of the first photographic essays, the book focused almost exclusively on the problems of the slums, there are sections on Italians, Jews, Blacks and other immigrants. His photos of children – homeless, delinquent, or doing piecework in windowless rooms – are icons of the progressive movement. However, Riis did not stop with photographing problems, he imag(in)ed solutions. He was a staunch believer in the power of schools to overcome the slum: «The purpose of (The Industrial School) is “to …receive and educate children who cannot be accepted by the public schools either by reason of their ragged and dirty condition, or owing to the fact that they cannot attend but part of the time, because they are obliged to sell papers or stay at home to help their parents.»(Riis 1915 [1892]:189 quoting the report of the Children’s Aid Society).

The Industrial Schools run by the Children’s Aid Society taught “the three R’s” but also cooking, hygiene, sewing, and the other skills necessary to convert desperately poor immigrant children into productive parents, workers, and urban citizens. Riis’s photograph demonstrates how they also functioned to socialize and assimilate:

Very lately a unique exercise has been added to the course in these schools, that lays hold of the very marrow of the problem with which they deal. It is called “saluting the flag,” and originated with Colonel George T. Balch, of the Board of education, who conceived of the idea of instilling patriotism into the little future citizens of the Republic in doses to suit their childish minds. To talk about the Union, of which most of them had but the vaguest notion, or of the duty of the citizen, of which they had no notion at all, was nonsense. In the flag it was all found embodied in a central idea which they could grasp. (Riis 1915 [1892]:204).