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Object lessons: a cultural genealogy of the dunce cap and the apple as visual tropes of American education

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00309230.2011.560856

1477-674X

Heather Weaver,

Art Education and Development

Abstract When we look in depth at how the experience of education was represented in American culture, we find evidence of visual tropes representing evolving but persistent aspects of the experience of schooling, such as the performance of judgement, and the desire to know the world. These tropes were rendered in terms of pictorial conventions that went back centuries to chapbook woodcuts, and that by the early twentieth century had appeared and would reappear in movies, illustrations of novels and textbooks, magic-lantern slides and stereograph cards, and the art of popular magazines. Focusing on the dunce cap and the apple, this essay shows how these two simple objects arrived in the early twentieth century as icons for the process of education and the experience of schooling. While changing over time, they were important for the way in which they gave successive generations common symbols for understanding school. In the process of being appropriated repeatedly over the space of decades and centuries as symbols of the educational process, the dunce cap and the apple were transformed into conservative forms, dense with the layers of meaning that accrued to them. Keywords: American culturevisual imagestropesdunce capapple Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Nancy Beadie, Deborah Kerdeman, and John Alroy for their comments on an earlier version of this work. Notes 1"Comments on the Week's Films," The Moving Picture World, October 23, 1909, 567. D.W. Griffith, the most successful director of the pre-Hollywood period, is primarily remembered for his highly racist feature-length picture, The Birth of a Nation (1915), as well as Intolerance (1916). Yet it was as a director of hundreds of movie shorts with the Biograph Company that he first made a name for himself beginning in 1908. See Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 2Larry Cuban has calculated that in 1910, two-thirds of students in the US were enrolled in rural schools. See his How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1990, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 25. 3"Biograph Films," New York Dramatic Mirror, October 16, 1909. With the phrase "rustic school-days", the Biograph ad was indirectly referencing the song "School Days", written in 1907 by Will Cobb and Gus Edwards, and made very popular through sheet music, phonograph cylinders and vaudeville sketches. 4Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915, 1922; New York: Modern Library, 2000), chapter 13. For more on Lindsay and hieroglyphics, see Juan A. Suárez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2007), chapter 1; and Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), chapter 8. 5Iris Barry, Let's Go to the Pictures (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), 27. 6On the historical importance of objects as carriers of meaning in American culture, see for example Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). 7As a study of visual semiotics, this research owes much to Lindsay's idea of hieroglyphics, but it has also been influenced by the following theorists and their work: Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, rev. ed. (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2003), as well as his Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990); Gunther Kress, "Text as the Punctuation of Semiosis: Pulling at Some of the Threads," in Intertextuality and the Media: From Genre to Everyday Life, ed. Ulrike H. Meinhof and Jonathan Smith (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), chapter 8; Gunther R. Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London: Routledge, 1996); Roger Chartier, "Texts, Printing, Readings," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), chapter 6; Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977). 8It should be pointed out that although this essay concerns the history of education, it is distinct from the wide range of social histories about policies, institutions, classrooms and individuals that have been central to the field. This essay is a cultural history, and specifically a mass-cultural history about representations of education in popular media. Other works to incorporate this approach include Jo May and John Ramsland, "The Disenchantment of Childhood: Exploring the Cultural and Spatial Boundaries of Childhood in Three Australian Feature Films, 1920s–1970s," Paedagogica Historica 43 (February 2007): 135–49; and Daniel Perlstein, "Imagined Authority: Blackboard Jungle and the Project of Educational Liberalism," Paedagogica Historica 36, 1 (2000): 407–24. Its focus on historical popular media notwithstanding, this essay does work in tandem with key concepts and approaches in the social history of education. To begin with, its argument about the persistence over time of a picture alphabet of visual tropes affirms David Tyack and Larry Cuban's concept of a conservative "grammar of schooling" in American society. See their Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). This research additionally relates to the growing body of work on visuality and the material world that has been produced by historians of education. See for example: Marc Depaepe, "Belgian Images of the Psycho-Pedagogical Potential of the Congolese During the Colonial Era, 1908–1960," Paedagogica Historica 45 (December 2009): 707–25; Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, School (London: Reaktion Books, 2008); Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor, eds., Materialities of Schooling: Design, Technology, Objects, Routines (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2005); and Malcolm Vick, "What Does a Teacher Look Like?" Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (2000): 247–63. 9These two tropes continue to be important in American culture. Apples are used to market everything from teachers' conferences (as in the logo for the National Education Association's online learning forum), to children's clothing and goods at back-to-school time (as in the 2010 back-to-school catalogues produced by Hanna Andersson and Land of Nod). The dunce cap, for its part, continues to flourish as a trope of (mis)education in comic strips. For examples of the apple, see http://www.neaacademy.org; http://www.hannaandersson. comonlineCatalogs.asp; and http://blog.paradysz.com/2010/07/sightings-back-to-school-2010-email-and-catalog-promotions-part-1 (accessed October 26, 2010). For the dunce cap, see for example Bill Watterson, "Calvin & Hobbes" (December 1, 1993); and Mark Tatulli, "Lio" (September 4, 2009). 11Frank Pierrepont Graves, A Student's History of Education: Our Education Today in the Light of Its Development, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 276–77. 10Stephen Duggan, A Student's Textbook in the History of Education (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 239. 12See for example Frederick C. Grant, The Life and Times of Jesus (New York: Abingdon Press, 1921), 182–84. The "riding upon an ass" prophecy is from Zechariah 9:9 in the Old Testament. 13For those fables that cast the ass as dull-witted, see Aesop: The Complete Fables, trans. Robert and Olivia Temple (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 195–206. 14 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "asinine". 15Ibid., s.v. "dunce". 16Dunce caps were alternatively called "fool's caps", and to varying degrees they were indeed visually reminiscent of medieval jesters' hats. Actually, this headwear lineage goes back further still. As Beatrice K. Otto has shown, the conical shape and the ears of fool's hats can be followed all the way back to the costumes of ancient Roman mimic actors. See her Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 198–202. 17Reprinted in Paul Leicester Ford, The New-England Primer: A History of Its Origin and Development (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1897). A Guide for the Child and Youth was published in 1725 by J. Roberts in London. For a look at the presence of the "zany" in American alphabet books, see Patricia Crain's The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 74–82. 18Alice Morse Earle, Child Life in Colonial Days (New York: Macmillan, 1899), chapter 10. 19 Plain Things for Little Folks (New Haven, CT: S. Babcock, 1831), 12–13. Babcock also used the dunce image elsewhere, as in, for example, a cover illustration for Infant Stories with Beautiful Pictures (New Haven, CT: S. Babcock, 1831). Like other chapbook printers, the Babcock press was not above borrowing its material. It had taken many elements of Plain Things for Little Folks from an eponymous 1814 book published in London, the earliest extant copy of which is: Mary Elliott, Plain Things for Little Folks; Seasoned with Instruction Both for the Mind and the Eye (London: William Darton, [1823?]). 20E.J.A., "Better Scholarship," Educational Research Bulletin 6, no. 2 (January 19, 1927): 32–33. 21 The Headless Horseman, dir. Edward D. Venturini (W.W. Hodkinson, 1922); and detail from Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Found Among the Papers of the Late Diedrich Knickerbocker, illus. Edna Cooke (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1924). 22[Girl seated in middle of room with books; smaller child standing on stool and wearing dunce cap], [1908?], Children at Play file, Stereocards Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. 23"But, Oh! See What They Are Studying!" (New York: Underwood & Underwood, [1906?]), School Classrooms file, Stereocards Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. 24By this period, the traditional dunce was actually beginning to be used as a joke. In his 1915 comedy short The Little Teacher (loosely based on D.W. Griffith's 1909 melodrama), Keystone director Mack Sennett plays a schoolboy who puts on the dunce cap and requests corporal punishment from the eponymous teacher (played by Mabel Normand, who was often romantically linked to Sennett). The Little Teacher (aka A Small Town Bully), dir. Mack Sennett (Mutual Film Corporation, 1915). 25 The School Teacher and the Waif, dir. D.W. Griffith (Biograph Company, 1912). 26 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "apple-polisher". 27See, for example, Alice Morse Earle, Child Life in Colonial Days, 69; Ellwood P. Cubberley, Readings in Public Education in the United States: A Collection of Sources and Readings to Illustrate the History of Educational Practice and Progress in the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 121; and Barbara Finkelstein, Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth-Century United States (New York: Falmer Press, 1989), 212. 28Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 9. 29"Expenses of Education, and Other Expenses: From Eleventh Annual Report (1847)," in Horace Mann on the Crisis in Education, ed. Louis Filler (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1965), 111. 30 Saturday Evening Post, illus. J.C. Leyendecker, September 18, 1909; detail from Teacher's Beau, dir. Gus Meins (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1935); and Bored of Education, dir. Gordon Douglas (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936). 31Reprinted in Paul Leicester Ford, The New-England Primer. 32Depicting both Adam and Eve became as or more common in subsequent editions of the Primer. 33"An Extract from the Limbo of Etymology," in Southey's Common-Place Book, vol. 1, ed. John Wood Warter (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), 423. 34Patricia Crain describes this as part of a shift over to a "worldly alphabet". On the subject of A and apples during this period, she notes a fascination with A and apple pie. See her Story of A, 65–70 and 91–93. 35 The Royal Battledore: Being the First Introductory Part of the Circle of the Sciences, &c (London: J. Newbery, [1746]). Reprinted in Alice Morse Earle, Child Life in Colonial Days, 125. 36This image is from the Newburyport version as reprinted in Paul Leicester Ford, New-England Primer. Although it lacks a date, Ford estimated that the Newburyport version was printed around 1790. See 46–48. 37This image and the accompanying verse were reprinted in Samuel Chester Parker, A Textbook in the History of Modern Elementary Education (Boston: Ginn, 1912), 98. George Emery Littlefield noted the American popularity of this primer in his Early Schools and School-books of New England (Boston: Club of Odd Volumes, 1904), 116. Edwin Pearson included an alternative version of this engraving in his Banbury Chap Books and Nursery Toy Book Literature [of the XVIII. and Early XIX. Centuries]: with Impressions from Several Hundred Original Wood-Cut Blocks (London: Arthur Reader, 1890). 38[Washington Irving], The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, illus. Felix O.C. Darley (New York: American Art-Union, 1849); and Joseph Boggs Beale, "Ichabod Crane: The Village Schoolmaster" (Philadelphia: Briggs, [1890?]). 39Detail from "But, Oh! See What They Are Studying!". 40 Collier's, illus. Frederic Stanley (January 22, 1921). 41This citation is from Daniel Fenning, The Universal Spelling-Book; Or, a New and Easy Guide to the English Language: To Which Have Been Added, Murray's English Grammar, and a Copious Introduction to Arithmetic (Derby, UK: Thomas Richardson & Son, 1842), 41. Frances Austin notes that Fenning's speller was first printed in Boston in 1769. See her "Daniel Fenning: ?–1767," History of Reading News 23, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 3–4. 42Noah Webster, The Elementary Spelling Book, Being an Improvement on the American Spelling Book (New York: American Book Company, 1908), 140; Clifton Johnson, Country School in New England, 55. 43 Saturday Evening Post, illus. J. C. Leyendecker, August 7, 1915. 44 Saturday Evening Post, illus. C. W. Anderson, October 4, 1924. 45John Dewey, Psychology, rev. ed. (New York: American Book Company, 1891). Dewey invokes the apple 13 times in this text. For the passages on apples and the child, see: 208, 361–62. 46For a good summary of how Dewey saw desire as analogous to interest, see Alan R. White, "Dewey's Theory of Interest," in John Dewey Reconsidered, ed. R.S. Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 42–43. 47 School's Out, dir. Robert McGowan (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1930). 48Elizabeth Ann Wiatr notes that the marketing of stereoscopes and stereograph cards to schools reached its apex in the 1920s. See her "Seeing American: Visual Education and the Making of Modern Observers, 1900–1935" (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2003), 46. 50J.B. Colt, "Among the Things…," Education 18, no. 10 (June 1898), li. 49J.B. Colt, "We Do Not Know How to Convince You," Education 18, no. 10 (June 1898), iv; and Simon Henry Gage and Henry Phelps Gage, Optic Projection: Principles, Installation, and Use of the Magic Lantern, Projection Microscope, Reflecting Lantern, Moving Picture Machine (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing, 1914), 61.