Recently historians of education have been pointed towards the value of sounds and silences in order to come up with new frameworks that might enable researchers to better understand the complex ways in which education historically has been shaped (Verstraete, Hoegaerts & Goodman, 2016). In this presentation we would like to couple this acoustical perspective to another recent plea, namely the inclusion of emotions in the toolbox of the historian of education. The emotion that will be focused on is shyness (Sobe, 2012). The school indeed is one of those sites where children who are not as eager as other children to engage themselves in social life are increasingly diagnosed as shy or silent children. Especially psychology contributed to this emotional problematization of an acoustic way of being (preferring being silent rather than speaking out loud) (Lane, 2008). Although several cultural histories of shyness already do exist – one for instance can refer to the recent book of Moran Shrinking violets: The secret life of shyness, the excellent American overview Shrinking violets and Caspar Milquetoasts: Shyness, power, and intimacy in the United States, 1950-1995 by McDaniel or the 2006 study published by Scott on The medicalization of shyness – it seems that the role attributed to education has not yet been fully explored. In this presentation the question will be asked when and to what extent education became part of the problem, in the sense that the early educational experiences were identified as causal factors of the psychological disfunctioning. On top of that we will zoom in on how education not only was seen as part of the things that caused the psychological problem, but actually also was looked at when it came down to suggesting ways to overcome shyness. Both inside the school as well as outside of the school initiatives were deployed to learn children as well as adults to cope with/overcome their psychological problem. The research period will run from the end of the nineteenth century up till the eighties of the twentieth century. the source material will consist of Dutch and French publications about shyness that were retrieved by exploring the collections of the national French Library François Mitterand, the Royal Library of Belgium and the Royal Library of the Netherlands. In addition to existing scholarship within the field of history of education, the main idea that underlies the presentation is not so much to frame the history of the silent shy within theories of medicalization (Cohen, 1983), but to unravel some of the ways in which psychological thinking and practices increasingly have gained ground in education throughout the twentieth century (Gleason, 1999).

I will make use of Dutch, French and Belgian source material running from the end of the nineteenth century up till the 1980's. These publications will be gathered by exploring the collections from the Belgian, Dutch and French national libraries by making use of the words verlegenheid, verlegen, timidité and timide.

We believe the case study on the history of shyness might enable us to contribute to ongoing historiographical discussions about the way education and psychology have interacted with one another throughout the twentieth century as well as reveal the role played by education in the history of shyness itself - something which the majority of the existing studies have kind of neglected.

•Cohen, S. (1983). The mental hygiene movement, the development of personality and the school: The medicalization of American education. History of Education Quarterly, 23(2), 123-149. •Gleason, M. L. (1999). Normalizing the ideal: Psychology, schooling, and the family in postwar Canada (Vol. 10). University of Toronto Press. •Lane, C. (2006). How shyness became an illness: a brief history of social phobia. Common Knowledge, 12(3), 388-409. •Lane, C. (2008). Shyness: How normal behavior became a sickness. Yale University Press. •McDaniel, P. (2003). Shrinking violets and Caspar Milquetoasts: Shyness, power, and intimacy in the United States, 1950-1995 (Vol. 40). NYU Press. •Moran, J. (2017). Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness. Yale University Press. •Sobe, N. W. (2012). Researching emotion and affect in the history of education. History of Education, 41(5), 689-695. •Scott, S. (2006). The medicalisation of shyness: from social misfits to social fitness. Sociology of Health & Illness, 28(2), 133-153. •Verstraete, P., Hoegaerts, J., & Goodman, J. (2016). Educational soundscapes: Sounds and silences in the history of education. Special issue Paedagogica Historica