What do you think?
Rate this book
Visual History: Images of Education
Addressing questions about representation, this book critically explores the potential of different types of visual material to illuminate historical studies. The contributions in this collection range from explorations of picture schemes used in 19th century classrooms to contemporary popular representations of schooling. Film and photographic images are considered in specific contexts, presenting case studies along with theoretical reflections about methods, values and the very nature of historical studies. Images are examined in children’s literature, in the induction of history of education students, in the recreation of past practices and in the promotion of government policies. Visions of education are put alongside discussion of ‘the visual turn’, its value to historians, its relations with questions about the construction of knowledge and the archive. A range of positions on the visual are represented in the collection. Without presenting an orthodoxy the book aims to promote new awarenesses of this important aspect of education history and the issues it raises.
268 pages, Paperback
First published March 8, 2005
24 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 16, 2014
A friend of mine at work spotted this, mostly for the chapter by Catherine Burke on time-travel, which I’m not even going to talk about – and so, since it seemed to be mostly on what I’m doing my thesis research on, this looked like an ideal book to get my hands on. And so it proved to be in many ways, although not always for the reasons I had expected.
This is an edited collection of essays – this time on the theme of ‘what can we learn about education from images of schools or images used in schools?’ One of the chapters essentially answers, not a lot, which we will come to. But the others are much more generous. There is a lovely chapter at the very beginning of this on the civilising influence that was felt to be available for working class kids in Manchester who were exposed to images from high art or from scientific drawing at the end of the 19th Century. There are a couple of essays on popular films and how education is depicted in these and what this depiction says about how education gets represented in popular culture. There is also a nice piece on what doesn’t get said, on what doesn’t get shown in the photographic archive when it comes to images of schools.
But the two bits of this book I want to really look at are the introductory chapter – which gives a good overview of the issues involved in getting meaning out of photographic images and why people have tended to see the ‘pictorial turn’ in sociology and history as being both ‘all too hard’ while tending to rely on the same tools to interpret images as they have since the ‘linguistic turn’. Then I want to also look at the chapter where we are told images and the study of images is a waste of time and therefore ought to be avoided.
Before I do, though, I need to tell you about something in the last chapter which really stopped me, about the difference between modernism and post-modernism. But I’m not going to tell this in exactly the same way Derek Bunyard does –rather I’ll give my own choice of detectives.
Modernism is a bit like Sherlock Holmes. With Holmes, and detectives like him, the world that is available to us is Cartesian. There is the thinking individual – who thinks and therefore is – and then there is the world. But the world must be approached on the basis of a radical form of doubt. Why? Well, there’s this dead body and nobody is owning up to having caused it to be dead. Not just that, everyone has a pretty damn good reason why they can’t have been the one that caused this dead body to be dead. So, radical doubt is pretty well a mandatory attitude to the world, someone is lying, so you need to assume everyone is lying. The expectation is that via an uncompromising application of reason we will spot the flaw in these variously presented worlds, allowing for the denouement, where Holmes gets to put down his violin and pick up his needle for a little intravenous recreation.
Postmodernism provides quite a different kind of detective entirely – he is Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Sure, he tries to do the whole Holmes thing, he tries to do the whole, ‘I will do experiments and be objective and stand outside to see the truth’ – but Faye Dunaway is both client and lover. And she has secrets she certainly doesn’t want him to learn and so just about everything Jack Nicholson does stuffs things up. And all this happens following the BEST of intentions. It isn’t that Nicholson is incompetent, it isn’t that he is stupid, it isn’t that he is vindictive – it is that the world is more complicated than we can guess and that our theories only make sense at the time we propose them, but a little more data completely undermines what we thought we knew as certain only just before. And, worst of all, our good intentions can be the cause of horrible, horrible harm, even when we more or less know ‘the facts’. We don’t get to be ‘outside’ looking in as one of these detectives. There is no ‘outside’ – and what we do impacts what will happen, not just after the even when we know ‘who did it’. This is postmodernism.
As I said above, the introduction to this book gives a nice overview of the whole question of semantics – how do we come to understand ‘the sign’ – whether that sign is a word or an image? They give a quick, but useful, overview of Saussure and his notion of the sign as being composed of the signifier and the signified – but then also run through how this idea has been used by various theorists to apply to more than just language, per se, but to all ‘signs’ in social life. One of the key lessons being that, “The upshot is that the objects of history, the material resources of the practice of historical research and of the creation of historical knowledge, are subject, always, inevitably, to interpretation. Secondly, it also means that the very objects of history ‘themselves’ are not of certain and self-announcing definition.” Page 20
That is, there is no transparent history or historical object that does not need to be made sense of from within some ‘way of seeing’ the world. To not mention the fact that you have a ‘way of seeing’ the world doesn’t give you a free pass, it just means you probably don’t even realise yourself that how you are seeing the world is not absolute and unconditional.
Which is a part of the problem I had with the chapter called ‘Filming the Black Box: Primary Schools on Film in Belgium, 1880-1960’. The authors start off by saying that although they analysed some film (films from popular culture) that were set in Belgium schools, they really didn’t think these images told them anything that was worthwhile. In fact, to understand these bits of film they really had to turn back to more traditional sources of information – and the analysis of film added nothing to this process that would not have already been available from other rich traditional sources. Bottom line? Don’t bother with visual research.
Now, this is a remarkable thesis in a book like this. Like I said, there are some really fascinating chapters here, the one of Moholy-Nagy’s stunning photographs of Eton from the late 1930s really does show what can be done when one applies some intelligence to visual histories. Also, if you look again at the title of this book, a chapter on why the visual turn is going down a blind alleyway isn’t the most obvious chapter to find here. So, three cheers for academic objectivity and all those sorts of things. But, I do have to sort of defend visual interpretations and the use of visual methods over and above those of traditional historical research. If only because my thesis would be pretty well a waste of time if this thesis were true.
The reason why I knew I would be writing on this chapter is that there are about four pages here where Eric Margolis’s work on school photographs is criticised. I have met Eric a couple of times now and consider him a friend – but just because you like someone doesn’t really mean that aren’t completely wrong. I actually found the paper that the authors here discuss at some length by Eric to have been really useful for my thesis and to have taught me important things about what you can and can’t expect to learn from images of schools. My thesis is that you can learn a lot about social stereotypes from the images schools use to represent themselves in their marketing materials. The point being that schools make these marketing materials so as to portray an ‘ideal world’ and so, in looking at what is shown and what is not shown in this ‘ideal world’ we can learn something about the real world and, presumably, what makes that world less than ideal – what makes it ‘ugly’ in the eyes of those who are promoting schools.
Take this little fact as a case in point. I’ve looked at lots and lots of school videos, websites and prospectuses, but I’m yet to see an image of a child with a disability greater than wearing glasses. Children with disabilities simply do not exist in the ideal world of school marketing materials, but they certainly exist in schools. Now, that says something that I think is interesting. The kids that are chosen to be displayed are generally remarkably good looking. There is never a pimple, there is rarely a hair out of place, there is hardly a uniform that isn’t pressed to within an inch of its life. Such representations of schools construct education in very particular ways. Ways that are classed and gendered and raced.
One of the things that I’ve found along the way, learnt from considering the theory I’ve read regarding photography (from books like Bourdieu’s On Photography or Rose’s Doing Family Photography) is that how we take family photographs (what we choose to record, how we choose to record it) is part of a social semiotic system which Bourdieu sums up when he says that in family photography we can take nothing but what must be taken. This is probably less true today, in some ways, with iPhones and therefore eternally available cameras – but it is harder to say than might be assumed. Gillian Rose makes it clear that ‘art shots’ aren’t particularly welcome in the world of family photography, which is really about establishing relationships. Why is this important when we are talking about school marketing materials? Well, one of the things I’ve learnt along the way is that private schools in Australia are much more likely to include photographs that look a lot like family photographs. For example, nearly two-thirds of images used by private schools to depict interactions between teacher and student show a one-to-one relationship. This is a lot like a parent-child relationship that is being depicted. Only about one-third of teacher-student relationships in state schools show a similar child-parent image. Private schools show depictions of schools that have a very similar content to that which might appear in family photography.
But this is only true of the content of the images. The form of them has this reversed. Family photography relies on posed images. You know, you tell your child, “Sit by the Christmas Tree, smile, hold up your toy”. Everyone who looks at the images knows this is ‘staged’, but that is almost ‘the point’. The other way of taking such an image is to try for the ‘slice of life’ shot. These look much more ‘natural’ – as if they were saying, ‘this is real life, a bit like a David Attenborough documentary’. About two-thirds of the images of kids in classrooms in private schools showed kids in un-posed ‘slice of life’ shots. The opposite (that is, two-thirds) of images in state schools had kids in posed shots. Why? Well, I’ve proposed that kids in state schools are expected to be ‘less disciplined’ than kids in private schools – and that this is a big part of the often stated reason why people say they send their kids to private schools in the first place, that is, because of the lack of discipline in state schools. So, state schools are much more likely to want to display ordered, happy, disciplined classrooms. Private schools don’t have to do that, because it is assumed discipline will not be an issue, but rather they can show kids ‘being themselves’. This even goes so far as to impact on whether kids will be shown laughing or not. Other than one state school, which was a bit of a special case, I was unable to find a single image of a state school kid laughing in any of the materials –whether the kids were depicted as being in class or not. I was able to find lots of images of private school kids laughing in lots of the schools, and even while they were in classrooms and in libraries. Laughing means very different things in state and private schools. Particularly when referenced to notions of ‘discipline’.
This chapter says of studies like mine into what images might mean – “The source material is too limited in its content and number to be a representation of reality and can only really be used as a complement to the textual sources with which it has to be interpreted” Page 229. Earlier they say, “Moreover, and a little ironically, what can be gleaned from popular, propaganda, didactic and amateur films depends on a prior knowledge of traditional textual sources” Page 222. And just to nail this, and in case you were in any doubt, “If we looked at photographs in the numerous tributes and memorial books that were published about educational history, we can see the answer: there is nothing to be gained from this field, neither on the image nor next to it; neither in the content nor in the form.” Page 221.
So, clearly I don’t agree with them. I think that there is much to be learnt from the images that one selects with which to construct a vision of the ideal schooling experience – and this ‘selection’ process itself (what is included, what is left out) has much to tell us about what schools think parents, in particular, want from a school. But even more than this, it also tells us something about the kinds of stereotypes that operate in our society – the roles that ethnicities, genders and classes are expected to play and therefore, how these are likely to be represented in these marketing materials. Case in point – I’ve found lots of images of white kids helping non-white kids in these materials, but am yet to find a SINGLE image of a white kid being helped by a non-white kid. In fact, one of my favourite images is of two white girls helping a single Asian girl, who, by the way, looks a bit terrified by all the attention. No wonder Asian kids are outperforming white kids at school, if white kids are having to spend all of their time helping them…
Can we really say we can learn nothing from such examples of ‘content’? Does the differing proportions of slice of life and posed images I mentioned above really tell us nothing about different schools?
The fact is that images aren’t the ‘be all and end all’ of research – but in the marketing materials I’ve been looking at images take up much more than half of the available space. In fact, some videos don’t have a single spoken word throughout. All you see and hear is crappy music and video images. The images are meant to be ‘transparent’. They are expected to not require supporting text. We need ways of talking about these images and what these images are seeking to tell us. That isn’t being provided by people saying there is nothing these images tell us that is worth hearing.
So, that is my whinge for the day. As you see, I think it is important to stress that Filming the Black Box has missed a very important point, and not just because they said something nasty about someone I’m rather fond of, but also because I really do think there is much to learn from images. That is, that images often are more eloquent and disarming and unguarded than ‘traditional’ texts are. As such, images can illuminate traditional theories – even to the point of extending or perhaps refuting them – where traditional texts, which have centuries of dissembling to rely on, can conceal and confuse where we believe they are being most transparent.
Most of this book really was worth the read. If you have read to the end of this and are interested in reading my paper discussing social class and school photos in marketing materials, let me know and I’ll send you a link to the paper. I’ve 50 free copies I’m allowed to give away.
By the way - I can't begin to tell you how much I like the photo on the cover of this book.
This is an edited collection of essays – this time on the theme of ‘what can we learn about education from images of schools or images used in schools?’ One of the chapters essentially answers, not a lot, which we will come to. But the others are much more generous. There is a lovely chapter at the very beginning of this on the civilising influence that was felt to be available for working class kids in Manchester who were exposed to images from high art or from scientific drawing at the end of the 19th Century. There are a couple of essays on popular films and how education is depicted in these and what this depiction says about how education gets represented in popular culture. There is also a nice piece on what doesn’t get said, on what doesn’t get shown in the photographic archive when it comes to images of schools.
But the two bits of this book I want to really look at are the introductory chapter – which gives a good overview of the issues involved in getting meaning out of photographic images and why people have tended to see the ‘pictorial turn’ in sociology and history as being both ‘all too hard’ while tending to rely on the same tools to interpret images as they have since the ‘linguistic turn’. Then I want to also look at the chapter where we are told images and the study of images is a waste of time and therefore ought to be avoided.
Before I do, though, I need to tell you about something in the last chapter which really stopped me, about the difference between modernism and post-modernism. But I’m not going to tell this in exactly the same way Derek Bunyard does –rather I’ll give my own choice of detectives.
Modernism is a bit like Sherlock Holmes. With Holmes, and detectives like him, the world that is available to us is Cartesian. There is the thinking individual – who thinks and therefore is – and then there is the world. But the world must be approached on the basis of a radical form of doubt. Why? Well, there’s this dead body and nobody is owning up to having caused it to be dead. Not just that, everyone has a pretty damn good reason why they can’t have been the one that caused this dead body to be dead. So, radical doubt is pretty well a mandatory attitude to the world, someone is lying, so you need to assume everyone is lying. The expectation is that via an uncompromising application of reason we will spot the flaw in these variously presented worlds, allowing for the denouement, where Holmes gets to put down his violin and pick up his needle for a little intravenous recreation.
Postmodernism provides quite a different kind of detective entirely – he is Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Sure, he tries to do the whole Holmes thing, he tries to do the whole, ‘I will do experiments and be objective and stand outside to see the truth’ – but Faye Dunaway is both client and lover. And she has secrets she certainly doesn’t want him to learn and so just about everything Jack Nicholson does stuffs things up. And all this happens following the BEST of intentions. It isn’t that Nicholson is incompetent, it isn’t that he is stupid, it isn’t that he is vindictive – it is that the world is more complicated than we can guess and that our theories only make sense at the time we propose them, but a little more data completely undermines what we thought we knew as certain only just before. And, worst of all, our good intentions can be the cause of horrible, horrible harm, even when we more or less know ‘the facts’. We don’t get to be ‘outside’ looking in as one of these detectives. There is no ‘outside’ – and what we do impacts what will happen, not just after the even when we know ‘who did it’. This is postmodernism.
As I said above, the introduction to this book gives a nice overview of the whole question of semantics – how do we come to understand ‘the sign’ – whether that sign is a word or an image? They give a quick, but useful, overview of Saussure and his notion of the sign as being composed of the signifier and the signified – but then also run through how this idea has been used by various theorists to apply to more than just language, per se, but to all ‘signs’ in social life. One of the key lessons being that, “The upshot is that the objects of history, the material resources of the practice of historical research and of the creation of historical knowledge, are subject, always, inevitably, to interpretation. Secondly, it also means that the very objects of history ‘themselves’ are not of certain and self-announcing definition.” Page 20
That is, there is no transparent history or historical object that does not need to be made sense of from within some ‘way of seeing’ the world. To not mention the fact that you have a ‘way of seeing’ the world doesn’t give you a free pass, it just means you probably don’t even realise yourself that how you are seeing the world is not absolute and unconditional.
Which is a part of the problem I had with the chapter called ‘Filming the Black Box: Primary Schools on Film in Belgium, 1880-1960’. The authors start off by saying that although they analysed some film (films from popular culture) that were set in Belgium schools, they really didn’t think these images told them anything that was worthwhile. In fact, to understand these bits of film they really had to turn back to more traditional sources of information – and the analysis of film added nothing to this process that would not have already been available from other rich traditional sources. Bottom line? Don’t bother with visual research.
Now, this is a remarkable thesis in a book like this. Like I said, there are some really fascinating chapters here, the one of Moholy-Nagy’s stunning photographs of Eton from the late 1930s really does show what can be done when one applies some intelligence to visual histories. Also, if you look again at the title of this book, a chapter on why the visual turn is going down a blind alleyway isn’t the most obvious chapter to find here. So, three cheers for academic objectivity and all those sorts of things. But, I do have to sort of defend visual interpretations and the use of visual methods over and above those of traditional historical research. If only because my thesis would be pretty well a waste of time if this thesis were true.
The reason why I knew I would be writing on this chapter is that there are about four pages here where Eric Margolis’s work on school photographs is criticised. I have met Eric a couple of times now and consider him a friend – but just because you like someone doesn’t really mean that aren’t completely wrong. I actually found the paper that the authors here discuss at some length by Eric to have been really useful for my thesis and to have taught me important things about what you can and can’t expect to learn from images of schools. My thesis is that you can learn a lot about social stereotypes from the images schools use to represent themselves in their marketing materials. The point being that schools make these marketing materials so as to portray an ‘ideal world’ and so, in looking at what is shown and what is not shown in this ‘ideal world’ we can learn something about the real world and, presumably, what makes that world less than ideal – what makes it ‘ugly’ in the eyes of those who are promoting schools.
Take this little fact as a case in point. I’ve looked at lots and lots of school videos, websites and prospectuses, but I’m yet to see an image of a child with a disability greater than wearing glasses. Children with disabilities simply do not exist in the ideal world of school marketing materials, but they certainly exist in schools. Now, that says something that I think is interesting. The kids that are chosen to be displayed are generally remarkably good looking. There is never a pimple, there is rarely a hair out of place, there is hardly a uniform that isn’t pressed to within an inch of its life. Such representations of schools construct education in very particular ways. Ways that are classed and gendered and raced.
One of the things that I’ve found along the way, learnt from considering the theory I’ve read regarding photography (from books like Bourdieu’s On Photography or Rose’s Doing Family Photography) is that how we take family photographs (what we choose to record, how we choose to record it) is part of a social semiotic system which Bourdieu sums up when he says that in family photography we can take nothing but what must be taken. This is probably less true today, in some ways, with iPhones and therefore eternally available cameras – but it is harder to say than might be assumed. Gillian Rose makes it clear that ‘art shots’ aren’t particularly welcome in the world of family photography, which is really about establishing relationships. Why is this important when we are talking about school marketing materials? Well, one of the things I’ve learnt along the way is that private schools in Australia are much more likely to include photographs that look a lot like family photographs. For example, nearly two-thirds of images used by private schools to depict interactions between teacher and student show a one-to-one relationship. This is a lot like a parent-child relationship that is being depicted. Only about one-third of teacher-student relationships in state schools show a similar child-parent image. Private schools show depictions of schools that have a very similar content to that which might appear in family photography.
But this is only true of the content of the images. The form of them has this reversed. Family photography relies on posed images. You know, you tell your child, “Sit by the Christmas Tree, smile, hold up your toy”. Everyone who looks at the images knows this is ‘staged’, but that is almost ‘the point’. The other way of taking such an image is to try for the ‘slice of life’ shot. These look much more ‘natural’ – as if they were saying, ‘this is real life, a bit like a David Attenborough documentary’. About two-thirds of the images of kids in classrooms in private schools showed kids in un-posed ‘slice of life’ shots. The opposite (that is, two-thirds) of images in state schools had kids in posed shots. Why? Well, I’ve proposed that kids in state schools are expected to be ‘less disciplined’ than kids in private schools – and that this is a big part of the often stated reason why people say they send their kids to private schools in the first place, that is, because of the lack of discipline in state schools. So, state schools are much more likely to want to display ordered, happy, disciplined classrooms. Private schools don’t have to do that, because it is assumed discipline will not be an issue, but rather they can show kids ‘being themselves’. This even goes so far as to impact on whether kids will be shown laughing or not. Other than one state school, which was a bit of a special case, I was unable to find a single image of a state school kid laughing in any of the materials –whether the kids were depicted as being in class or not. I was able to find lots of images of private school kids laughing in lots of the schools, and even while they were in classrooms and in libraries. Laughing means very different things in state and private schools. Particularly when referenced to notions of ‘discipline’.
This chapter says of studies like mine into what images might mean – “The source material is too limited in its content and number to be a representation of reality and can only really be used as a complement to the textual sources with which it has to be interpreted” Page 229. Earlier they say, “Moreover, and a little ironically, what can be gleaned from popular, propaganda, didactic and amateur films depends on a prior knowledge of traditional textual sources” Page 222. And just to nail this, and in case you were in any doubt, “If we looked at photographs in the numerous tributes and memorial books that were published about educational history, we can see the answer: there is nothing to be gained from this field, neither on the image nor next to it; neither in the content nor in the form.” Page 221.
So, clearly I don’t agree with them. I think that there is much to be learnt from the images that one selects with which to construct a vision of the ideal schooling experience – and this ‘selection’ process itself (what is included, what is left out) has much to tell us about what schools think parents, in particular, want from a school. But even more than this, it also tells us something about the kinds of stereotypes that operate in our society – the roles that ethnicities, genders and classes are expected to play and therefore, how these are likely to be represented in these marketing materials. Case in point – I’ve found lots of images of white kids helping non-white kids in these materials, but am yet to find a SINGLE image of a white kid being helped by a non-white kid. In fact, one of my favourite images is of two white girls helping a single Asian girl, who, by the way, looks a bit terrified by all the attention. No wonder Asian kids are outperforming white kids at school, if white kids are having to spend all of their time helping them…
Can we really say we can learn nothing from such examples of ‘content’? Does the differing proportions of slice of life and posed images I mentioned above really tell us nothing about different schools?
The fact is that images aren’t the ‘be all and end all’ of research – but in the marketing materials I’ve been looking at images take up much more than half of the available space. In fact, some videos don’t have a single spoken word throughout. All you see and hear is crappy music and video images. The images are meant to be ‘transparent’. They are expected to not require supporting text. We need ways of talking about these images and what these images are seeking to tell us. That isn’t being provided by people saying there is nothing these images tell us that is worth hearing.
So, that is my whinge for the day. As you see, I think it is important to stress that Filming the Black Box has missed a very important point, and not just because they said something nasty about someone I’m rather fond of, but also because I really do think there is much to learn from images. That is, that images often are more eloquent and disarming and unguarded than ‘traditional’ texts are. As such, images can illuminate traditional theories – even to the point of extending or perhaps refuting them – where traditional texts, which have centuries of dissembling to rely on, can conceal and confuse where we believe they are being most transparent.
Most of this book really was worth the read. If you have read to the end of this and are interested in reading my paper discussing social class and school photos in marketing materials, let me know and I’ll send you a link to the paper. I’ve 50 free copies I’m allowed to give away.
By the way - I can't begin to tell you how much I like the photo on the cover of this book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review