Medico-science and school hygiene: a contribution to a history of the senses in schooling

Abstract

This article takes as its inspiration Ian Grosvenor’s conjectural essay presented for the symposium “Historiography of the Future: Looking Back to the Future” held at the International Standing Conference for History of Education (ISCHE) 33 in July 2011 in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It contributes to a sensory history of schooling by examining how the problematisation of schoolchildren’s eyesight in school hygiene manuals noted by Grosvenor was, to a large extent, made possible by the deeper transformations that occurred in science in the mid-nineteenth century. These included changes in scientific practices and techniques, the invention of new instruments and the emergence of new “scientific selves” that were, in large part, linked to the emergence of objectivity as a scientific ideal. The “objective view” and practices associated with the ideal of objectivity combined with the predominant style of statistical reasoning reinforced the truth claims of senses research by preeminent European scientists. In turn, it made credible and legitimated the findings that resulted when new scientific techniques, methods and instruments associated with the ideal of objectivity were applied to investigations of schoolchildren’s eyesight in the mid-nineteenth century. Medico-scientific investigations that began by first identifying aspects of schooling that caused harm to the sense of sight were later expanded into multiple hygiene(s) and made possible a broader discourse of school hygiene elaborated in the school hygiene manuals that proliferated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The extent to which precepts of school hygiene underscored the reform of pedagogy and the materialities of schooling suggests that the results of these investigations were profound and far-reaching.