Democracy and discipline: Object lessons and the stereoscope in American education, 1870–1920

“Come to life” realism: View‐Master reels and the legacy of stereoscopic imperialism

“…The content of the image does not matter so much as the way stereoscopy is used to instill ideas about how people should process visual experience. Childhood studies scholar Meredith Bak gives the example of how an Underwood stereograph of street peddlers in New York could be used in a variety of educational contexts, from home economics to civics (Bak, 2012, 151). Stereoscopy, so wielded, blesses an image with the false distinction of having some essential (although flexible) truth that can be extracted from it.…”

“…Education relies on establishing image codes that are common across stereoscopic experience and associating them with knowledge that can be acquired about the subject. As Bak writes, “in arguing that the stereoscope offered a new kind of mental reality, the rhetoric surrounding its educational uses conflated a highly mediated experience with a lived physical encounter” (Bak, 2012, 148). Pedagogical use of the stereoscope relates the heightened sensory data with the actual experience of the phenomenon being depicted, a conflation that becomes even more compelling in virtual reality.…”

Cinema and Education: a history of the discourses in favor of cinematography in schools

“…Images in general and those from the mechanical precedents of cinema -the stereoscope, the zootrope, the zoopraxiscope, the kinetoscope etc. -had been used in advance to educate in many contexts (Bak, 2012). Proof of this was the use of the chromotrope and the magic lantern in 1838 by the Royal Polytechnic Institution of London to teach scientific and historical facts under the premise that "[…] the education of the eye is, unquestionably, the most important means for elementary instruction" (Dussel, 2014, p. 86).…”

Projecting the Future of Education

“…8 During the last two decades, industry-led promotional efforts and governmental initiatives to introduce commercially produced media into the classroom have received increasing attention from media historians and historians of education. 9 They have addressed the promotion and introduction in Western education of high-profile educational technology such as film, radio, television, and computers 10 and of less technical, yet for their time equally novel, visual aids such as wall charts, geographical maps, and textbook illustrations. 11 These studies shed light on the discourse and priorities of producers, educational reformers, and policymakers.…”