Silence or the sound of limpid water: disability, power, and the educationalisation of silence

Abstract

In this article the history of silence is looked at from an educational perspective. By closely examining the way three nineteenth-century authors – who all based their educational theories on concrete experiences with persons with disabilities – have related themselves to silence, it will be argued that silence has been educationalised. Silence has been increasingly integrated in the teacher’s official tool box in order to make sure a new kind of discipline can be encountered in the classroom. The educationalisation of silence that can be found in the works of Jean-Marc Itard, Edouard Seguin and Maria Montessori seems to have been paralleled by a transformation in the way power was wielded over pupils in schools. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, silence seems to have lost its ability to symbolise critique and increasingly to have been used to steer the behaviour of children in a subtle way. In other words, by closely looking at the work of Itard, Séguin and Montessori one can see how silence became an integral part of a new educational landscape that tried to seduce children to do particular things and act in a particular way. In nineteenth-century schools the sound of docility would indeed gradually be replaced by the seduction of silence.