“Exact and Lasting Knowledge": Visual Education in the United States

This paper discusses the uses of stereopticon slides as tools for visual training in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. In the 1890s and 1900s, American educators, scientists and cultural critics became anxious about citizens’ visual abilities, arguing that their ability to attend and observe was declining precipitously with the onset of industrial urban life. Sensing an opportunity for profit, publishers and corporations rushed to create and circulate sets of slide lectures, illustrated textbooks, models, wall charts, portable displays, and photographs intended to educate the minds and eyes of American youths. Envisioning an entirely new market for their wares, they officially categorized these materials as the tools of what, in 1906, the Keystone Slide Corporation dubbed “visual education.”
To explore the larger questions of visual education, this paper focuses upon the Keystone 600, a packaged set of stereopticon slides and accompanying text found in nearly every school in the nation by the 1910s. The set sought to train students to read visual images, and, by extension, the world, by training them to order, sort, rank and typologize. Teachers using the sets and scripts employed a complex blend of word, image and technique to cultivate common visual practices among their students. This training would, supporters of visual education argued, contribute to the establishment of a unified national identity, and result in a physically and mentally competent citizenry. The history of the Keystone 600 illuminates contemporary ideas about the extraordinary power of the visual in the early twentieth century—educators using it asserted that visual media could give more rapid and direct access to knowledge than its verbal counterparts, that the knowledge gained via visual means was universal, and that perception could be standardized.