Congratulations to Sarah Anne Carter for an intriguing book that presents Pestalozzian educational theory, which suggests the use of artifacts as teaching tools. As the title indicates, she focuses on object lessons, both handmade and manufactured, which were a nineteenth-century convention to develop student thinking skills and increase participation in learning. Object lessons were a distinct move away from memorized rhetoric that fostered not only new tools for teachers but also changes in school furnishings, such as replacing benches and tables with individual student desks.
This short read is the result of ten years of work at noted institutions consulting with skilled professionals. It contains 143 pages of text with the remaining 56 pages made up of an index, some rich footnotes, and a large selected bibliography. The book is well researched and documented with a few notable exceptions pertaining to artifact analysis, which she highlights late in the book. The book is organized into a prologue and introduction with metaphors and definitions, five main chapters, and an epilogue that provides evidence of current use in methodology.
Carter sets the stage in the first chapter by presenting background on the pedagogy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi which is the basis for the object lessons. She creates a clear picture by putting the reader in a classroom during an object lesson. Her illustrations also include wonderful examples of artifact or specimen boxes and object lesson cards published both in Great Britain and America, along with information about the use of these prepackaged lessons. Sadly, these are limited, and while Carter includes a section on how advertising may have drawn from metaphors of object lessons, information about specific companies such as Oliver and Boyd and Bancroft Bros. and the marketing and business strategies producing these teaching tools is extremely limited. Also interesting were visual examples of object lessons that demonstrate political and geographic studies through imports such as trade cards and the 1892 presidential McKinley object lesson. Carter carefully chose images to support her arguments, and all are relevant with the exception of Plate 12. It is an 1860 sentimental genre print called “Increase in the Family” from one of the collections I curate, the Harry T. Peters “America on Stone” Collection. Plate 12's caption states, “genre scenes not explicitly designed for instruction could become the subject of structured picture lessons.” The comment is hard to relate with this print without a specific object example and the image is superfluous. Another example of an object-lesson card would have been more valuable, as these sets contain great range of content, and the NMAH education collections contains a variety of Bancroft object cards. Another useful choice could have been an image of student assignment of a scrapbook containing natural specimens.
The author's best work is when she focuses on the history of object lessons and the study of natural and manufactured artifacts in the classroom. She probably could have taken the origins further back in history to European cabinets of curiosities designed for collecting pleasure and amusement as well as student study, and the earlier student-teacher nature study walks. She does an excellent job documenting the work of Charles and Elizabeth Mayo, the omnium-gatherum box, the curriculum experiments of Edward Austin Sheldon in Oswego, New York, and the success of the object lesson in promoting pedagogy based on involving students in teacher-led lessons. These chapters should appeal to educational historians and positively sing to material culturists, museum curators, and museum educators.
The use of object studies to codify social opinions on race and ethnicity was a nineteenth-century practice that continued well into the twentieth century, but the chapter detailing this, “Object Lessons in Race and Citizenship,” is a bit confusing. While the chapter heading indicates the issue of citizenship, there is little discussion about using patriotic imagery and school pageants in public schools to facilitate a resurgence in nationalism and political agendas. Carter theorizes that industrial and domestic training schools racially contextualize objects studies. There is nothing new in the premise that industrial and domestic training promoted a subversive form of racism, or that federal Native American boarding schools attempted to eradicate entire sections of Native American culture under the guise of assimilation; however, it is unclear whether a racial factor exists because objects were used in training, or if there is a disproportionate use of object lessons because some school lessons stemmed from object lessons in these particular schools. She elaborates with Frances Benjamin Johnston photographs in which African American and American Indian students actively use 3-D objects to enhance their comprehension of science, math, and history concepts. In addition, she provides charming depictions of children role-playing and using Friedrich Fröebel–inspired “gifts and occupations” in kindergarten as examples of object lessons. However, just because these kindergartens served as early day care for the racially and ethnically diverse, it does not automatically follow that these populations primarily used object lessons. More statistics and analysis would be needed, particularly with age as a factor, but this may be problematic in mixed-age rural schools.
Another image depicts lessons for blind students at the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts using specimens to touch, but again this method of teaching for the blind would, out of necessity, be more than an alternative teaching method. These images broaden the main concept of object lessons to encompass all object-based student materials or nontextual alternative forms of teaching and learning that employ objects as tools. While the argument may be valid, it should then also include more examples of manipulatives and primary period educational toys and more studies on the types of school use.
The last chapter, the epilogue, and the “Bibliographic Essay: Object Lessons in the Archives,” which follows the extensive notes, should not be missed. In these, Carter further outlines her research and semantic struggles in defining what constituted object lessons throughout the nineteenth century. The task proved daunting due to the wide range of documentation in public schools and the varied language of material culture studies among historians in education. In the epilogue's conclusion, Carter discusses the differences between the object-lesson method and material culture studies. The practitioners of object lessons were teachers conducting a form of show-and-tell with their students, whereas scholars of material culture are usually adults in academic or museum settings. She emphasizes the similarities between the classic museum studies artifact lessons of Charles Montgomery, E. McClung Fleming, and Jules Prown, all of which were designed for museum studies students, archaeologists, museum educators, connoisseur development, and the training of interns and volunteers by curators.
Strangely, however, Carter did not include the 2001 teacher-designed lesson book Artifact & Analysis: A Teacher's Guide to Interpreting Objects and Writing History, produced by the Smithsonian Institution Center for Education and Museum Studies and the National Museum of American History. While similarities exist, comparing twentieth-century artifact and object studies to nineteenth-century object studies is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. While on the surface many of the observations and areas of inquiry are the same, definite differences exist in purpose and depth of analysis between students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School learning to make furniture and later museum-related training. A better analogy would have been comparing nineteenth-century object studies designed by teachers (for example, objects with guide cards such as those the Bancroft Bros. produced) to current digital studies of artifacts that teachers use in lessons. These tools were designed to be age appropriate and flexible toward the child's studies. Examples include the following:
• Smithsonian Learning Lab, https://learninglab.si.edu/news/using-artifacts-to-inspire-critical-thinking,: An interactive platform that gives educators access to millions of Smithsonian digital resources and provides tools to upload, download, adapt, create, and share with students.
• Smithsonian's History Explorer, https://historyexplorer.si.edu: An innovative online resource developed by the National Museum of American History in partnership with the Verizon Foundation that includes object studies for teaching and learning American history.
• ThingStor:, https://www.materialculture.udel.edu/index.php/2019/02/22/thingstor-goes-live/, An interactive material culture database, supported by the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware, for finding objects in literature and visual art.
This book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century classroom curriculum as well as anyone interested in object-centered teaching. Without including numerous teacher and student memoirs, it provides valuable insight into a creative teaching method that thrives to this day.
