Session Information
17 SES 02, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
The Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs were once very powerful in modelling the education future, with their displays of innovative objects and processes, their competitive spaces and their drive to agree standards and develop classifications. A new pedagogic relation between state and people was formed in which exhibitions became the catalysts and the linking narrative between new systems, media, technologies and institutions. Comparison between states, based around identity and production, became increasingly transparent and organized. Together they constituted a new mode of production in education, parallel to that of schooling. The future was organized and turned into a display of required objects and techniques which put entire nations into an elevated, viewable space. The material aspects of the Exhibitions across the range of educational activity – the actuality of the displays and objects, their origins and international connotations, the local and international industry of education, their purposes, the new pedagogic relation between state and people, national identity and comparisons, the flow of intellectual capital, and the networks of individuals engaged in ‘education’ were all brought together in these spaces.
The Swedish Schoolhouse is one example of this competition and pedagogy, but with a significant form and scale. An entire model school was constructed and displayed at the World’s Fair in Vienna [1873], the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia [1876] and Paris Exposition Universelle [1879]. The school was entirely filled with Swedish pedagogic objects [desks, pens, globes, scientific instruments, texts and other school artefacts]. The purpose of the Fair, and in this case the Swedish Schoolhouse, was to provide examples of ideal and future models of education, and to stimulatenew markets with the displayed commercial methods of education. The Schoolhouse exhibited national pride in Swedish education developments and progress to an external audience and to a home audience as well.
Using archives and catalogues in the UK and Sweden, the Schoolhouse will be recreated using these selected objects and an analysis provided about the importance of the Schoolhouse to Swedish education at the time, and the effects of the schoolroom on its World Fair audiences.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
The direction of thinking at the moment is that the Schoolhouse represents both an idealized version of Swedish education at the time, an ambitious attempt to find an external education market, and a reflection of the relatively advanced state of Swedish education in Europe. Finding an external education market can also be considered as a way of strengthening the legitimacy of new domestic educational reform [being international at home].
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