Figure 5 was the frontpiece to Children of the Poor (Riis 1915 [1892]). Note the crowded classroom with windows that open onto a brick wall, Riis’s image symbolically represents the progressive view of schooling as a process of Americanization. Although we can make out a desk with a book and school bell in front, two female teachers (or a teacher and teacher aide), and what appears to be an arithmetic lesson on the board, clearly the most important lesson is the diverse group of students saluting the flag [7]. The bell brought them 9 to attention (as in Figure 1), all eyes on the flag, bodies in rank and file, little hands raised in salute, the watchful gaze of the teachers. Here again Foucault helps understand the deeper curriculum beyond reflex patriotism: «Place the bodies in a little world of signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory response: it is a technique of training, of dressage… .. The training of school children was to be carried out in the same way: few words, no explanation, a total silence interrupted by signals – bells, clapping of hands, gestures, a mere glance from the teacher …» (Foucault 1995:166).

4. Turn of the Century Photographs

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes (1981:22-26) described two qualities of photographs: “punctum” (which I will discuss later), and “studium” which is informed by a “kind of education (civility, politeness)…” Studium is the socially prescribed, statistically “average,” meaning of interest to the historian and social scientist interested in describing what the image depicts. The Detroit Publishing Company collection at the Library of Congress alone has more than 200 photographs of ornate urban highschool buildings dated between 1900 and 1910 similar to Figures 5. These images were made to be published as postcards and testify to an outbreak of conspicuous civic consumption that the historian of urban education, David Tyack (1974:56), punned as an “edifice complex.” City schools cost three times as much in 1910 as they did in 1890. Between 1890 and 1918 high school attendance increased by a staggering 711% (Tyack 1974:183). Secular Gothic cathedrals, urban high schools symbolized both the central position of schools in the community and, circulated as postcards, suggested the forwardthinking, wealth, and prestige of the city that constructed them.

There are far fewer interior views of urban schools, and fewer yet that show schooling taking place. However there is an extraordinary collection of turn-of-the-century photos of educational activities. One of the most accomplished school photographers was Frances Benjamin Johnston whose unabashedly progressive politics informed her professional eye (Daniel 1974). During six weeks in 1899 she exposed 700 negatives in a systematic study of public schools in Washington D.C. (Kirstein 1966:54). In that project Johnston pioneered techniques depicting progressive educational principles, focusing on active student-centered education and inquiry based learning; she posed many groups of students involved in laboratory experiments, life drawing lessons, sculpture, shop, and home economics; she recorded nature study trips, and visits to museums and workshops. In his positivist history How Teacher’s Taught, Larry Cuban employed Johnston’s photos as a source of data, noticing whether desks were bolted down or movable, and counting and comparing activities. He observed that: «Out of almost 300 prints of elementary school classrooms, nearly 30 show groups of students working with large relief maps in geography, preserved rabbits and squirrels being used for a lesson, students watching a teacher carve into a cow’s heart to show the parts of the organ, and classes taking a trip to the zoo. The remaining 90% of the prints show students sitting in rows at their desks doing uniform tasks at the teacher’s direction» (Cuban 1993: 26).

Cuban’s description was rather “thin” as opposed to the “thick” description of ethnography (Geertz, 1973). Johnston set out to show what progressive education looked like. She posed teachers engaging in direct instruction, but also students debating, reading and working in groups [8]. In The New Education Illustrated, a self-published collection of Johnston10 ’s Washington photographs, her co-author Edith Westcott made their intent clear: «Our object is … to bring before teachers and parents of children not enjoying such advantages, a presentation of what has been done in a single city as representative of a … feature of Public School Education. The cry of the New Education is for the triple training of hand, head, and heart» (Westcott and Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston c. 1900:1).

I selected figure 6 to demonstrate some of the qualities of Johnston’s studies. The modern chemistry lab is well-equipped with Bunsen burners, a sink, glassware, chemicals, and reagents. Well-dressed males and one female student are shown actively engaged in laboratory work while the teacher looks on in the pose that some might characterize as “the guide on the side.” Figure 6 was selected to make the point that Johnston photographed in both Black and White schools, and in ensemble the collection presents a clear view of the segregated dual school system maintained in the Nation’s capital. While the modern viewer will immediately note the difference between chemistry for Whites and cooking and cleaning for Blacks, in 1899 this was considered separate but equal, and education for Blacks was itself progressive. Furthermore, to make her point about progressive educational practices, whether White or Black, she selected upper-middle-class schools. In turn-of-the-century Washington D.C. there were many schools not nearly as well equipped. Many urban high schools today do not have such well stocked labs, and small classes with hands-on individualized instruction have generally been replaced by lectures and video presentations.

 

5. Mid-Century Photographs

One of the largest, and certainly the most famous photographic archive is the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) collection at the Library of Congress. Most of the 164,000 photographs in the FSA/OWI collection are digitized and can be accessed on-line [9]. Although there are more than 3000 photographs of schools in the file, there are very few pictures of urban schools from the FSA phase because the mandate of the Farm Security project, as expressed by Hartley Howe (1940), was: “to make a photographic record of rural America …” Marjory Collins left us photographic documentation that in the 1940’s chemistry classes featuring hands on instruction were part of the high school curriculum for African American students in Chicago. Another arresting was image was made by Edwin Rosskam outside of a “Negro high school” in Chicago. While FSA photographers worked diligently to include African Americans in the FSA/OWI and to depict the special suffering brought on by Jim Crow, the collapse of king cotton, and the great migration north, they did not make a single photograph of an integrated school (Margolis 2005). No doubt this appeased the Southern “Dixiecrats” in Roosevelt’s New Deal Coalition. Edwin Rosskam, who made figure 8, also selected the FSA photographs used to illustrate Richard Wright’s passionate book 12 Million Black Voices. Wright’s poetic narrative takes us beyond the image to reveal the world of these Chicago children’s lives. «We watch strange moods fill our children, and our hearts swell with pain. The streets, with their noise and flaring lights, the taverns, the automobiles, and the poolrooms claim them, and no voice of ours can call them back. They spend their nights away from home; they forget our ways of life, our language, our God. Their swift speech and impatien eyes make us feel weak and foolish. We cannot keep them in school; more than 1,000,000 of our black boys and girls of high school age are not in school. We fall upon our knees and pray for them, but in vain. The city has beaten us, evaded us…»(Wright 1988 [1941]:136).