The Foreign Qualities of Objects: “Object Lessons” and the Creation of a Material Geography

An “Object Lesson” is a specific a mode of classroom pedagogy based on the material, sensual, and associative qualities of objects, things, and pictures. Originating in European Romantic pedagogy, Object Lessons became popular in America in the 1860s through the work of educator E. A. Sheldon (1823-1897) and his colleagues and quickly spread throughout the United States. Object Lessons forced children to learn about the world through their senses, instead of through texts and memorization, leading to new modes of classifying and comprehending material evidence drawn from the close study of objects and pictures. In addition to studying everyday objects made and used close to home, Object Lessons allowed teachers and parents to instruct children in the commodity history of familiar items like pungent spices, smooth silks, and precious metals extracted from, produced in, or related to faraway places. This paper examines Object Lessons on “foreign” objects or objects deemed to have “foreign qualities” as they were given in primary school classrooms from the 1860s through 1900. Like all Object Lessons, these moved from the familiar to the unknown, offering children a material, somatic map of the world constructed out of the items they encountered every day. This geography often transcended political and national borders, focusing instead on natural and cultural resources. The idea of the “Object Lesson” was certainly employed to study foreign objects at world's fairs, but Object Lessons on everyday commodities worked differently. They brought faraway places into children's daily lives, offering children social and cultural biographies of things and reconnecting children to everyday objects, their origins, and means of production, even as they offered children a new material geography. This paper draws upon pedagogical texts, surviving Object Lessons, and the archival records of schools that employed this mode of pedagogy.