In a 1931 exercise book from Pitman, New Jersey, Fred Swartz, a sixth-grade boy, reflects on his teacher's attempt to get him and his classmates to learn more about Japan. Swartz writes proudly, “We made booklets on Rice, Tea, Rubber and Silk. The best ones on rice were made by Mona, Horace S., Harry and myself. We brought in things made in Japan and put them on the window sill. We drew pictures of a scene of Fujiyama and painted them” (Figure 1).Footnote 1 Swartz's exercise book entry demonstrates the potential pitfalls of education about foreign cultures, or “global education” as I will refer to it in this essay, which many scholars have criticized for its often imperialist agenda.Footnote 2 Rather than transforming children into caring and critical world citizens, it has instead, in the case of the United States, reflected back an image of the nation as a benevolent and powerful contributor to a world economy. In this case, the young author's catalogue includes items central to imperial trade between the United States and Japan, and also positions the child as a consumer who contributes to the continuation of the power structures of an imperial past. While Japan was never formerly colonized by the United States, merchants and missionaries flocked to the island nation as early as the 1830s and military occupation following World War II continued this presence well into the twentieth century.Footnote 3 By purchasing objects from Japan and putting them on display, the young boy is complicit in this process in a way that positions these didactic lessons as a form of empire building rather than global education – although arguably the two often do collapse into one another.
Written entry on Japan from Fred Swartz's exercise book, 1931.
However, when paired with other pages from Swartz's exercise book and placed into relief against the cultural backdrop of the times, a more nuanced view of 1930s global education comes into focus. The same child later writes, “our teacher put some questions on the board about Japan,”Footnote 4 suggesting that the items that the children created were more than just decorative, and several entries mention trips over to the local high school to complete drawings, which include those on Japan as well as India and Africa, indicating that these studies took place over an extended period of time and were more than just tokenistic gestures to support cultural diversity. Following the flurry of activity to increase children's rights globally in the 1920s, Progressive educators of the 1930s aimed to carry on the work of international bodies that included the League of Nations and the International Bureau of Education. Building on efforts to foster world friendship following World War I, these educators continued to introduce children to the values of global citizenship through established methods that included pen pal exchanges, plays and performances, and international children's books.Footnote 5 Yet because adults were at the forefront of the global education movement in the early twentieth century, it is difficult to discern how children participated in, and responded to these calls for, global citizenship.
School records, including exercise books, letters, art projects, and other ephemera created and produced by children – what I will hereafter refer to as the “children's archive” – reveal the competing demands on young people that emerged from the global education movement: on the one hand, to see the United States and its role in the world as an imperial power; on the other hand, to uncover new information about the world beyond US borders in an effort to foster world peace. Such mixed messaging was rooted in educational transformations stemming from a wave of internationalism for children that began in the 1920s, which supported the cosmopolitan values set out through activities sponsored by national and international organizations with a focus on world peace. During this decade, the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association (LNA) worked to support some of the League of Nation's values and was a way for Americans, who were not officially associated with this international organization, to participate in League business.Footnote 6 From its beginnings in 1923, the LNA began commissioning didactic reading materials for children and, by 1927, they added to this work by sponsoring educational competitions with prizes. In his book on the emergence of international society in the 1920s, historian Daniel Gorman describes how one young winner of this competition received the top prize of a trip to Geneva, where she then went on to give a “rosy-eyed picture of the assembly's deliberations on world peace.”Footnote 7 The involvement of children in educational competitions reflects the equally competitive nature of global education, which focussed on making children of individual nations better prepared for a world market, but it also sowed the seeds for more truly innovative work for redefining education during a decade where the repercussions of the 1929 stock market crash challenged children and their families financially and made thinking globally seem less likely to be on the curriculum agenda.
This fervor for change signaled a desire to internationalize the American educational system and could be witnessed in the National Society for the Study of Education's well-received International Understanding through the Public School Curriculum, published in 1937. As the title suggests, the organization advocated for an educational curriculum that would reflect the worldview embedded in children's books popular at the time. In particular, Isaac Kandel, a pioneer in the field of comparative education, suggested that an international education needed to be more integrated in the US school system in order to be successful, otherwise it risked being solely for the purpose of supporting national foreign policy.Footnote 8 Kandel's comments demonstrate how previous attempts to engage American children in world politics, such as the activities of the LNA, were shortsighted in their attempts to instill cosmopolitan values in young children. While they may have presented opportunities to reinforce the ideas promoted by President Woodrow Wilson in his famous “Fourteen Points” speech of 1918, and in his earlier 1917 address to the US Congress where he called for “peace without victory,”Footnote 9 it did not create any meaningful change in the way children viewed themselves as citizens, instead merely reaffirming their identity as Americans.
In order to ensure the successful employment of an international education for the young, children were encouraged to produce artwork, scrapbooks, letters, and other materials that documented their engagement with this curriculum. Despite the role of adults in the production of this material, these archival items remain a valuable resource for recovering the historical experiences of children as they navigated national imperatives to position themselves as global citizens. While scholars in childhood studies have long championed the value of such archival material when tracing the lives of children from the past,Footnote 10 the debate about how to recover historical children's voices is particularly fraught when dealing with children's exercise and performance of citizenship roles. In their edited volume Children's Voices from the Past (2019), editors Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove, and Carla Pascoe Leahy ask, “how do we understand the perspectives of children in the past and not just the adults who so often defined and constrained the parameters of youthful lives?”Footnote 11 Similar questions arise in Jennifer Light's States of Childhood (2020), a history of junior republics from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. These republics, which enabled young people to act out adult roles on a miniature scale, were central to producing a “double life” for those who participated in them.Footnote 12 Yet, as Light concedes, the narratives surrounding these youth-led experimental towns are mainly focussed on the adult actors: States of Childhood's “focus is the adults in the story, but, where possible, it excavates the views of youthful participants.”Footnote 13 Because the search for these materials is riddled with challenges, from poor cataloguing to the very ephemerality of the materials themselves, children's voices are easily overshadowed by adult narratives, even by those most intent on recovering their voices.Footnote 14
This is certainly the case when it comes to global education for the young. While the historical relationship between US empire and global education is well documented, there are few attempts to consider how children responded to these lessons about the world beyond the nation. As the materials produced by young people reflect, the categories of “outsider” and “insider”, or of “foreign” and “domestic,” became central to the construction of the child as global citizen. A system of power that attempts to impose coherence on the world it seeks to control, US empire aims to create clear demarcations and divisions between the “colonizer and colonized, national and international spaces, the domestic and the foreign.”Footnote 15 Yet children often occupy spaces in between these positions. They are at once both colonizer and colonized, or situated within national and international, domestic and foreign spaces.Footnote 16 These categories converge and blur in a way that “unsettles” the boundaries between the two in a process that I describe as the “anarchy of children's archives.”Footnote 17 In the materials I consider, familiar images of home and family – the hearth, the cooking pot – frequently appear and position the child snugly within the nation. Yet these images are also contrasted with scenes of the “foreign” – a harsh wilderness, a cultural object – as a way of imaginatively positioning the child outside this domestic space. By the 1950s, such tensions between the foreign and the domestic would serve the nation's interests in gaining the ideological upper hand in the Cold War;Footnote 18 yet in the 1930s a more Progressive element, carried over from earlier educational experiments and social movements of the 1920s, resulted in more nuanced variations – that is, the “foreign” could just as easily transform those within the nation as it could those outside it. Educators, in a true Horatio Alger style of uplift, embedded global lessons not only to make children more knowledgeable about the world outside the nation, but also as a means of preparing them for the harsh realities of the world within it.
PITMAN, NEW JERSEY: RACE AND EMPIRE
A closer look at Swartz's exercise book begins to reveal the intersections between the competing interests of the nation, Progressive educators, and the children being encouraged to become global citizens. The exercise book itself is made of light blue paper, with a drawing of a fireplace and a rug underneath the label “log of the month.” A clock, which rests on the mantle of the fire, is set for three o'clock, the time which Swartz later states is when school lets out. Swartz has cleverly placed firelogs on his drawing where “LOG OF THE MONTH” appears and above this is a cooking pot attached to a rope, upon which “MY SCHOOL DIARY” is written (Figure 2). While Swartz never comments directly on his exercise book cover, he has already positioned the school firmly within the domestic space, here depicted as an image of home. Such a snug setting, reminiscent of the living-room hearth where families gather together to relax, doubles as a metaphor for the nation. Set inside the flames of the fire, the pot simmers and boils until it is ready to be served, just as the children at school must learn until they are prepared to contribute to society as full-grown citizens. Such associations between home and nation were certainly not new. Deployed well before Swartz was born, the “domestic nation” figured strongly in materials for children, particularly in efforts to justify the US's imperial activities abroad. In her discussion of nineteenth-century mission schools, Karen Sánchez-Eppler explains how central “home” became to constructions of a domestic nation, leading to a blurring of the “distinction between the national and the international” as authors of Sunday school tracts attempted to both bring those considered “foreign” into the fold of the nation and to also continue to underscore their fundamental difference from Americans.Footnote 19 While Swartz's cover page seems innocent enough, the pages within reveal how global education initiatives in the classroom intersected with brewing tensions between ethnic minorities and the white majority in small towns like Pitman and reflected earlier nineteenth-century concerns about racial difference and its increasing visibility due to new waves of immigration.
Cover page of “Log of the Month.”
Swartz begins by positioning himself as a model citizen and student, repeatedly making references to prizes and competitions, as well as his desire to improve his grades in his classes. On 5 May he writes, “To-day we got our report cards. I was in the Honor Roll and got 100 in Music. I still think I can get the few B's I got up to A's.”Footnote 20 Just a few weeks later, Swartz relates the results of one of his exams: “To-day we took the third part of our test. So far I have only missed three. If I do not miss any more I will get 94,”Footnote 21 and the following day he confirms a positive result, ending with the comment “I think mother will be pleased.”Footnote 22 Outside the classroom, Swartz joined in community activities, such as the local chapter of Kiwanis International where his father served as secretary. Devoted to building a better and stronger community, Kiwanis International claimed as part of its mission “to develop, by precept and example, a more intelligent, aggressive and serviceable citizenship.”Footnote 23 The organization clarifies this further in their 1930 issue Kiwanis in Brief, adding that their focus on citizenship aims to promote these values “through an understanding of the fundamentals of government and of our responsibilities as citizens to actively participate in the solution of public problems and in community service.”Footnote 24 In focussing on what they describe as “tangible enterprises,” the club aimed to achieve its motto of “We build,” launching activities that would build up their community by integrating those at its margins, including the recently immigrated and the incarcerated.Footnote 25
The extent to which the values and lessons of Kiwanis International shaped Swartz's views of the global education activities carried out in the classroom is unclear, but Swartz certainly aims to perform the model citizenship encapsulated in these values, taking up with enthusiasm the different learning opportunities offered to him. Carefully crafting his responses to appeal to his penmanship teacher, Swartz rarely says much about his own emotional involvement in these lessons. It is only when documenting a field trip to the nearby town of Woodbury, where the children were scheduled to listen to the former naval officer and famous explorer Admiral Byrd, that he begins to reveal more about his personal reactions. The day before the trip to Woodbury, Swartz writes, “I can hardly wait” and, when the presentation is over, he gives a slightly more reserved confession: “I think every one enjoyed it very much.” These entries, dated 14 and 15 May 1931, square with local newspaper reports, which announce the public event at Woodbury, to be held on 15 May, and relate how Admiral Byrd will tell of life in “Little America, the precarious little stronghold perched on the rim of the Antarctic ice – the world's last great frontier.”Footnote 26 In contrasting images of the domestic space and the frontier, the author of the report adds that, despite the harsh weather of the southern pole, “on the whole, the men were amazingly comfortable – well fed an [sic] snugly housed.”Footnote 27 Swartz is skeptical about some of what he is told by Byrd about his exploits, not taking these adult viewpoints at face value. As he writes, “The statement which I could hardly believe was that the South Pole was once tropical. I could not begin to tell of all the things he [Byrd] said. At one time he said these [sic] was 168° different in climate from ours.”Footnote 28
Swartz's disbelief in the differences in climate is understandable given the mixed associations with “Little America.” The publicity materials surrounding the expedition attempt to moor together images of home with that of the nation, and in doing so set these images against the unfamiliar background of the foreign, in this case the barren landscape of Antarctica. For children such as Swartz, Byrd's grand narrative of adventure would be enticing indeed, even if the imperial narratives of conquest embedded in the retelling of his exploits failed to convince them at times. Hailing from a little rural town in New Jersey, which was originally founded as a summer retreat for Methodist ministers in 1871 before officially being incorporated as a borough of Gloucester County in 1905, the explorer's life is a far remove from the daily tasks of writing competitions and penmanship activities required of Swartz and his classmates. In film accounts of his first expedition to Antarctica (1928–30), which were presented at the talk in Woodbury, Byrd is hailed as “The Conqueror” and “Hero of Heroes.”Footnote 29 Replacing the backwoodsman, men like Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo, with the war hero, the soldier is transformed into an explorer who can bring glory to the nation in another way by mapping new terrain that can expand its borders. Byrd and his crew are shown working hard to construct the buildings that will become “Little America.” The film director adds lighthearted scenes where man and animal (mainly penguins) play with each other, but ensures that the dangers the men faced are made apparent as well, from fierce blizzards to dangerously low temperatures that left icicles hanging from the men's nostrils. In doing so, they reinforce associations that children might have with home, including “snugness” and “safety,” capitalizing on descriptions of “Little America” as a miniature nation strong enough to protect those within its borders from the harsh climate that surrounds them.
Despite the distance between their lives and that of Byrd and his fellow explorers, Swartz and his classmates had their own adventures, ones that managed to import new cultural values rather than exporting American ones. While Byrd and his crew constructed a miniature America in the ice and snow of the Antarctic, Swartz and his classmates completed art and design activities that focussed on countries that included Japan and India, as well as the continent of Africa. As Swartz relates, the children spent time copying images and designs that originated from these regions. In addition to the aforementioned activity of copying the iconic image of Fujiyama, the highest mountain peak in Japan, Swartz and his classmates created “designs about Africa,” and Swartz adds that “our row is making designs for curtains.”Footnote 30 In his entry for the following day, Swartz opens with “the girls practice their Japanese dance this morning,” before discussing how these activities were supplemented by informational booklets and quizzes on the material that they had learned.Footnote 31 While many of these activities appear superficial, they remain instructive for they indicate how children in the 1930s were encouraged to transform the domestic space of the school through their art projects. One can easily imagine the fireside that graces the cover of Swartz's exercise book being decorated with the children's artwork. Art became a means of both preparing children for the workforce – there is a noticeable emphasis on skills that would contribute to textile and manufacturing businesses, particularly in their manual training courses – and introducing them to the benefits of a multicultural nation. What Diana Selig refers to as the “cultural gifts movement,” an early twentieth-century version of multiculturalism that aimed to celebrate the “gifts” brought by recent immigrants, was embedded in the global education movement that was designed to more closely knit together the nations of the world in an effort to avoid another world war.Footnote 32 Yet, even as educators sought to contribute to efforts to bring nations together, they also simultaneously silenced discussions of racial tensions within the United States. In a strategy similar to nineteenth-century Sunday schools, cultural “gifts” were carefully packaged, set on the mantle to gaze upon but not to open.
The careful distancing of global lessons from much closer domestic issues within the nation can be seen in the way the children focus on cultural groups that were reflective of the changes within their own local community, primarily recently immigrated Chinese from neighboring cities and a growing black population, without ever actually mentioning these changing community dynamics. Despite its humble origins as a summer religious retreat, by 1931 Pitman was a financially struggling borough in southwestern New Jersey. Once touted as a convenient suburb of Philadelphia, with a short commute to the city by electric rail, the town was submerged in financial difficulties like the rest of the country. In a historic photograph, dated May 1930, the children of Pitman are dressed all in white and line up to serve in the May Queen's court.Footnote 33 Although their faces are painted in some cases, it is clear from the images that this was a predominately white town. Yet, despite its lack of racial diversity, Pitman did welcome in immigrants from the area. As early as 1906, Alcyon Lake, one of the local nature spots, served as a community picnic ground for Chinese families in the area. Commuting from the larger towns of Philadelphia, Trenton, Chester, and Camden, the influx of these families brought diversity to the otherwise all-white town.Footnote 34 A popular amusement park located on the lake brought in thousands of visitors on a yearly basis, and it was only in the 1940s during World War II that these numbers began to dwindle. Town attractions such as the park therefore ensured that the small town, which even at its highest population has only numbered around nine thousand residents, was connected to the larger, and more cosmopolitan, cities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. However, as the Pitman Anti-Racist Collective community digital history project indicates, Pitman still struggled with the infiltration of white supremacists. In 1923, the townsfolk woke to a burnt cross, a remnant of the activity of the Ku Klux Klan, and were shocked given that the nearest KKK headquarters, in Pennsgrove, New Jersey, was twenty-four miles away.Footnote 35 The presence of the KKK is further confirmed by black historian Robert Tucker, who spent twenty-five years writing about Gloucester County, where Pitman resides. In his historical memoir, he writes that Alcyon Lake was a favorite meeting spot for KKK members, even hosting large family picnics to recruit new members and spread the Klan's ideology.Footnote 36
The racial divisions that plagued Pitman extended to the educational system. Three miles south of Pitman lies Elsmere, at the heart of which was the black community known as “the Acre.” Children from the Acre at one time walked two miles in harsh winter conditions to attend school, and it was only after a backlash from families living in this small community that a local farmer was hired to bus the children to their lessons. After a heavy snowfall left the children trapped in school overnight, Gloucester County decided to develop a new “black school” closer to the Acre. Few traces of Elsmere school, or other small, rural black schools like it, exist today. True to the historical narrative of 1930s education, children from the Acre were taught in subpar, even dangerous, conditions, while black children across the nation faced the risk of having their schools burned down. Due to these historical acts of violence, those with a stake in the archival materials from black schools are understandably hesitant to share them, drawing a curtain to keep those outside their community from having access to them.Footnote 37 Indeed, few of these materials are readily available within the public space.Footnote 38
What, given residents’ mixed response to the increasing racial and cultural diversity in the areas surrounding Pitman, was the local school doing introducing lessons on far-off countries that included Japan and India? A 1930 public school report from Nutley, a town to the far north of New Jersey, indicates that there was a wider adoption of a global focus in arts education for schoolchildren in the state. In speaking of the rationale for this focus, the author of the report writes,
Japan and Holland share the interests of the pupils and they vivify their mental pictures with projects representing the homes, costumes, habits, customs and industries of the people, as well as the geographical location. This year one class wrote a play on Japan and painted the scenery showing the sacred mountain [Fujiyama], and another group made costumes for a play which they wrote on Holland.Footnote 39
As proof of the children's interest in creating art and performances with these foreign scenes, a poem by fourth-grader Letitia Beliveau is included:
The same report provides examples of group projects the children have completed, though there are no visual facsimiles of this work. These included “Indian, Japanese and Dutch villages, the farm and other home scenes” which were reproduced using sand, wood, and other natural materials.Footnote 41 School reports such as this one, though produced by an adult hand, shifted the focus to children's creations and became an unintentional children's archive. This was due in large part to changes in the contents of the school report, which by the mid-1930s was less focussed on education in the traditional subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and instead showed concern for developing a happy and socially adjusted child. In line with this concern, educators began to showcase the value of their arts education programs, including “shots of children painting at easels, or engrossed in piano rehearsal.”Footnote 42 Accompanying these images of young artists in action were maxims such as “The child tells his story in his own way” and “He is not critical of his work until the higher grades are reached.”Footnote 43
More than an opportunity to paint, draw, or paste collages, art became a subject where schools could reinforce their focus on geography and different industries, and in doing so prepare children for their future role in the workforce. While focussing on the well-being of the child, with the aim to encourage children to continue in their studies during hard times, these activities directed the attention of the young on distant cultures and ignored the changes happening at their very doorstep. In the case of Pitman, Swartz repeatedly performs the role of the “good student,” never questioning his own role in building up a national imaginary of an exceptional nation. In part restricted by the form of the exercise book itself, his participation in an arts-based global education is reflective of the way schools across the United States were adapting their curriculum to cater to children of different social classes and academic abilities, including by merging reading, particularly of children's books, with the artistic endeavors that cover the pages of Swartz's logbook. In the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, a 1936 exercise book from the town of Hanover provides visual evidence of the activities that Swartz merely logs, showcasing how children of working-class families participated in these educational endeavors. Created by the hands of children under the watchful eye of the teacher, this exercise book similarly charts the daily classroom activities of the children by summarizing the highlights of the year, including with accompanying hand-drawn illustrations by its young contributors.
HANOVER, PENNSYLVANIA: CLASS AND GLOBAL EDUCATION
“The English Walnut” (1936) (Figure 3), developed by a group of fourth- and fifth-graders, underscores how global education did not escape social issues of class that were central in the United States during the Great Depression. Despite its humble origins as a school project produced by children, “The English Walnut” brought together youngsters from different social classes from the town of Hanover, Pennsylvania, where in the 1930s many families, including their children, were employed by factories in the textile industry. Because this particular historical artifact was put forward in state competitions, the school provided significant context for the production of this material, including the educational impetus for teaching its pupils about other countries as part of a regular global education curriculum.Footnote 44 The pages within the book demonstrate how schools grappled with the challenges of meeting educational demands for children who would likely leave their education early in order to help provide for their families, contributing to the economic recovery of the nation by preparing these individuals for the workforce. At the same time, the fact that it was completely made by the hands of children demonstrates how those of the working class participated in and responded to the narratives of global education popular in the 1930s, which blended images of home with those of nations beyond. In the case of “The English Walnut,” home became central to building common ground between children of different cultures.
Cover of “The English Walnut,” 1936.
Following one young boy's navigation of these competing images, it is possible to see how the working-class child participated in global education. In 1936, this same boy, Jesse Grogg, would be about thirteen years old. The “art director” for “The English Walnut,” Grogg's presence runs throughout the 1936 edition of the Walnut Street School class yearbook. His handiwork, a testament to the emphasis on arts education at the time, spans from illustrations of traditional subjects to that of the global education taught within the classroom. With his leadership on “The English Walnut,” Grogg is positioned as an active and influential student in the schoolroom. The yearbook, which also lists students’ progress in penmanship by marking their level, suggests that Grogg was a respectable student in other areas as well, having received a merit pin.Footnote 45 But by 1940, Grogg was no longer in school. A 1940 census lists Grogg, along with his other siblings, as members of the workforce.Footnote 46 As one of the youngest children, Grogg's educational career was cut short. With only their mother listed as the head of the household and a family of five (one of which was a grandchild), Grogg and his older siblings had their fair share to do. Indeed, Grogg would only complete school up to the eighth grade, ending his time in education to work as a “soler” in Hanover Shoe Factory just a few short years after the production of “The English Walnut.”Footnote 47
Grogg's life story is not necessarily phenomenal for the town of Hanover. With a population of around 15,000 by 1930, one of Hanover's biggest businesses was the shoe factory, which employed other children from the town, including some of Grogg's classmates, who would also go on to work after completion of their elementary schooling. The yearbook provides insight into how these children, who would not remain under the purview of the public schooling system, engaged with global education in their early years. For Grogg, his artwork provides the visual companion to Swartz's logbook, touching on similar themes and subjects through illustration. Just as Swartz is preoccupied with school competitions and the daily demands of his core schooling subjects, so Grogg underscores how his educational environment similarly cultivated an interest in these areas. In one of his first illustrations, Grogg depicts two young girls peeking out from behind a stack of books, each carefully labeled with traditional subjects that include geography, math, English, and spelling.Footnote 48 The girls, both blonde, are wide-eyed as if ready to take in the knowledge before them. Grogg chooses to label this illustration “The Highway of Books,” and while he does not author any of the accompanying text, the following pages include reports of popular nineteenth-century texts set in Europe, including Johanna Spyri's Heidi (1881) and Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates (1865).Footnote 49
Grogg's absence from the written contributions in “The English Walnut” are made up for by his strong presence in the visual elements of this student-run paper. His artistic contributions, which do not settle on one particular theme in the same way as Swartz's do, include a set of illustrations on sports, ships and boats, and inventions, among other things. However, when he does steer back towards the class's investment in “global education,” here presented as reading and arts activities focussed on European and indigenous cultures, his work is carefully penned, demonstrating his detail and concentration. In one particularly striking series of images, which has multiple children's initials in the corner to claim authorship, Grogg has completed a poster which stretches across two pages (Figure 4).Footnote 50
Illustration of “Eskimo Land” by Jesse Grogg, 1936. Image provided by the Hanover Public Library, Hanover, NJ. See footnote 50 for more on copies of “The English Walnut.”
Bursting forth in a multicolored rainbow that represents the aurora borealis in countries in the far north, Grogg attempts to depict the housing and religious artifacts of Arctic tribes. The busy illustration, crammed with all of the highlights found in the children's writings about their unit on “Eskimos,” is a hodgepodge of fact and fiction. While the dogsled team is an accurate portrayal of one method of transportation in the icy landscape of the northern regions, Grogg has a family of penguins waddling in the background as well, mixing up the fauna of the North and South Poles.
Children, as Swartz was in his own class activities, were encouraged to view these indigenous tribes as a unique “other culture” alongside that of European countries. While their acknowledgment of these differences was important, the contrast between the curriculum goals of these educational units and the children's responses to them is instructive. In a 1935 issue of the Evening Sun, one of Hanover's local newspapers, arts, crafts, and other creative endeavors are described as useful tools for integrating the study of more traditional subjects: “The outstanding feature of the integrated unit method of instruction is that it changes the whole pupil attitude. Instead of children feeling that they are forced to go to school, going to school becomes a glorious adventure.”Footnote 51 A tableau of the children's exhibits follows, including that of Walnut Street School. The same illustration that Grogg helped to design, with a burst of color from the aurora borealis that encloses the scene, is brought to life in this 1935 exhibit for educators. This includes “snow houses, dog teams and [a] bear. A cross section of an igloo … and numerous booklets, art objects and models [which] convey a complete impression of life in the Arctic regions.”Footnote 52 Japan, too, is covered in another display, with similar objects, including a “tea garden and lanterns” to help set the scene. Art is prominent with “projects done in charcoal” and a “good reproduction of Fujiyami [sic].”Footnote 53 Such views, reinforced by geographical series in children's literature, including the 1930s “Uncle Ben” workbooks which included letters written by a fictional world traveler – a format reduplicated in “The English Walnut” – provided a foundation for the integrated units that predominated in the district, and indeed reflect the more widespread focus on the “child's interest” which is raised in the earlier Nutley report.Footnote 54 These educational materials underscore how foreign themes seeped into the domestic school setting, deemed safe by educators who believed in their ability to help children who might otherwise struggle to thrive in school. That “safety,” which other scholars refer to as “strategic cosmopolitanism,”Footnote 55 depended on incorporating carefully ordered and organized images of the world. But even if educators just viewed these activities as educational experiments, informed by the views of famous Progressive educators that included John Dewey, they became a means of documenting and giving voice to children typically excluded from global education initiatives that employed similar techniques. In previous decades, radical publications such as W. E. B. Du Bois's The Brownies’ Book (1920–21) reserved the knowledge and skill needed to be a global citizen for the middle class and the privilege associated with it. Yet working-class children like Grogg have their voices glimmer and shine through in the children's archive, dismantling assertions that these children were all but absent from global education.Footnote 56
At times, these voices mix and mingle as the children choose to author certain contributions as a class group rather than as individuals. Grogg, a member of Grade 5-1, thus becomes part of the myriad of voices when the children are relating details of their Eskimo unit:
We made a cross section of an igloo showing the inside of the Eskimo’ [sic] home. The sleeping bench was made of rocks, moss, and skins, including the summer tent poles, and kayak paddles. We had a stove which was made of modeling clay to represent soap stone. Bones were used for the racks. The wick for the stove was made of moss.Footnote 57
The children's contribution is reflective of educators’ belief that lessons based on the child's interest will help them better succeed in school, but it also frames the discussion of foreign cultures, which were at the heart of special “integrated units” that crossed multiple year groups in the elementary school, through the lens of the domestic space again. As the children explored the different structures and styles of homes, they developed both real and imagined relationships to children from these cultures. In one poem, written by one of Grogg's classmates, the child begins, “I know a little Eskimo,” and in a later entry by another classmate a girl similarly writes, “I wrote a letter to a little Eskimo girl in Alaska. She answered my letter telling me all about her home.”Footnote 58 The children's activities continue to focus on home, even as they transition from instructional books and literary reading material to exchanges with children from these cultures. Their contributions, shaped by the variety of activities used to enforce the integrated unit on Arctic regions and other foreign cultures, not only work to display knowledge but also attempt to construct more meaningful bonds. As the Grade 1 class concludes, “We will never forget about the Eskimos.”Footnote 59
The children's enthusiasm suggests that the integrated units that the Hanover public-school district touted as central to their educational curriculum were a success. Many of the children listed either entered the labor force early, as did Grogg, or else came from families that had limited education and were employed in Hanover's local factories, including in the textile industry, where parents spent their days cutting fabrics or weaving.Footnote 60 In trying to reach these children during economically hard times, the public schools fulfilled their main objective of educating the young in core courses, including writing, spelling, and reading. Yet as one educator comments, these subjects “are merely tools with which to work.”Footnote 61 The display of children's creative work, gathered together in the pages of “The English Walnut,” was reflective of a shift in educational values, a turn that celebrated children's artistic creativity and allowed subjects to be led by child interest. While the children were, of course, influenced by the instructional material presented to them in classrooms, these units provided an opportunity for them to step outside the domestic sphere, even if only for a moment. These displays of the fluid boundary between the domestic and foreign were carefully crafted and constructed, as the literal building of foreign scenes indicates, but they demonstrate how the public school served as more than a site for exporting American values, through similar domestic scenes, abroad. The children instead looked to their young peers for instruction on their culture, expanding their body of knowledge from facts learned from schoolbooks to those learned from interpersonal relationships. In this respect, they modeled the core values of the global-education movement of the times, which viewed the child as “full of potentiality” and better able to achieve the goals of world peace through these exchanges than adult members of powerful international organizations such as the League of Nations.Footnote 62
CONCLUSION: PARTICIPATORY AND PARTICIPATING CHILDHOODS IN GLOBAL EDUCATION
Impossible as it is to say for sure the intent of the children in the archival records I have covered here, it is crucial to let such materials lead in the historical inquiry of global education. Such an approach can fruitfully contribute to existing debates within American studies about empire and the impact of globalization on this critical framework within the field. If, as Amy Kaplan first argued in 2002, US imperialism is a “network of power relations that changes over space and time,” inseparable from the resistant and unsettling processes of anarchy that seek to disrupt its dominating force,Footnote 63 then children's archives are a crucial contributor to the continuing evolution of empire and its meaning within a US context. In particular, the child's voice, which is documented and recorded through these archives, provides evidence of the slipperiness of the boundaries between the binaries that empire seeks to create, destabilizing the divisions between citizenship and empire, domestic and foreign, as in the case of global-citizenship education efforts both within and outside public-school settings. Given the lack of power children have traditionally held when it comes to controlling the narratives told about them, such a reorientation of the material in the children's archive is imperative. Not all of these children may “speak,” in the literal sense of conversing with curators or researchers – indeed, the fact that they will have outgrown childhood, if they are even still alive, ensures this inability to speak from the position of their childhood self – but the move to a more child-oriented focus on these historical materials provides a means of ensuring that the narratives that emerge from them are more diverse, with the voices of children colliding with the adults that they inevitably engaged with in the production of school materials.Footnote 64 Like the particles that produce the bright flashes of light of an aurora borealis, these moments of collision provide, even if only briefly, an array of colors that are more reflective of the lived experience of children.
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