We teach them the craft of word‐spinning. The damage is done, we should be teaching them the art of seeing. (Frank Pick) In 1937 the Council for Art and Industry sponsored a national exhibition in London of materials ‘for use in connection with teaching in elementary schools’. Local Education Authorities were encouraged to send representatives to the exhibition as a means of developing ‘a line of approach … to ensure that what is used in the elementary school may have quality of material, soundness of construction, fairness of colour and appropriateness of design, in sum, beauty’. Schools, the exhibition organizers argued, had a role to educate ‘the future consumer’ and in helping to set ‘a standard for industry in the next generation’. This article offers an account of the exhibition, detailing its development, the arguments and ideas about pedagogy that emerged in its planning and the final format of the event. This ‘story’ is then used to reflect on the Modernist project and the ‘art of seeing’ in order to illuminate the ways in which the material environment of schools shaped ideas and practice.