Learning to listen and look: the shift from the monitorial system of education to teacher-led lessons

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the relationship between the senses, power and educational change. A case study of a significant shift in instruction methods will be used to show how educational change is related to both the senses and to power. The monitorial system of education, as developed by Bell and Lancaster in the early 19th century, was a system that facilitated the instruction of large numbers of pupils by just one teacher. Most of the instruction was conducted by pupils, older and/or more experienced children, whereas the teacher had an overarching responsibility for overlooking the “machinery” without teaching much himself. In the second half of the 19th century the method was replaced by a new method in public elementary schools. From now on teacher-led lessons came to be the norm for what mass education should look like. This momentous change meant, among other things, that the relationship between pupils and teacher was transformed as the teacher increasingly was supposed to hold lessons, whereas the pupil to a greater extent became associated with listening to and closely observing a lesson.

KEYWORDS:

• Monitorial system of education
• teacher-led lessons
• power
• synopticon
• listening
• hearing

At the world’s fair in London 1871, the newspaper The Standard reported of a novelty in the Swedish educational exhibition. This year, Sweden distinguished itself by a new way of ordering the desks in the classroom.

The peculiarity in the Swedish system, as carried out by the leading schools, consists in giving each scholar, however young, a separate desk and seat, a space being left all round sufficient for a scholar to pass in any direction. The arrangement may consume an extra amount of space, but is admirably adapted to promote the good order of the school, and to protect the studious scholar from the interruptions of the playful and the restless (The Standard 1871-06-05).

This new classroom order was part of a major change in teaching methods that had been unfolding during the preceeding decades in Swedish schools leading to the introduction of teacher-led lessons. Some decades before a different method had prevailed, the so-called monitorial method of instruction, where elementary education made heavy use of pupils as “help-teachers” (so called monitors). In 1864 that method was formally abolished in Sweden, resulting in a new method of teaching children directly. This article discusses how we can understand this shift from a sensorial perspective.

In general terms, the aim is to discuss the relationship between the senses, power and educational change. Two premises guide the analysis. The first is that there is a close connection between power and the senses. The senses play a vital role in experiencing, constructing and resisting power relations. The second premise is that educational change can be understood in sensorial terms. Changes in education, for example new instruction methods, create new conditions for how the senses operate in the classroom, thereby also making possible new forms of power relations.

A case study of a significant shift in instruction methods will be used to show how educational change is related to both the senses and to power. The monitorial system of education, as developed by Bell and Lancaster in the early 19^th century, was a system that facilitated the instruction of large numbers of pupils by just one teacher. Most of the instruction was conducted by pupils, older and/or more experienced children, whereas the teacher had an overarching responsibility for overlooking the “machinery” without teaching much himself.¹ In the second half of the 19th century the method was replaced by a new method in public elementary schools. From now on teacher-led lessons came to be the norm for what mass education should look like (Linné 2001). This momentous change meant, among other things, that the relationship between pupils and the teacher was transformed as the teacher increasingly was supposed to hold lessons, whereas the pupil to a greater extent became associated with listening to and closely observing a lesson.

The birth of the modern teacher-led lesson in elementary schools will be analysed from two perspectives: the visual and the aural (cf. Landahl 2011, 2013). It will be argued that the shift towards teacher-led lessons created a new classroom order and that the quality of this newness is especially evident in two respects. In aural terms, it will be argued that a new significance was given to the concept of silence as pupils to a greater degree were expected to listen to the teacher. In visual terms, it will be shown that the teacher-led lessons not only created a panoptical space but also created a new synoptical relation between pupils and teachers.

There are a number of potential sources that can be used to shed light on the sensory worlds of schooling. Pedagogic and architectural journals, teaching guides, oral testimonies, teacher and pupil autobiographies, school photographs, documentary films, and reports from education conferences can all provide valuable evidence (Burke and Grosvenor 2011) but many of them cannot be used for the early 19^th century. The main source that has been used in this article is teaching manuals. There are two reasons why teaching manuals offer a valuable perspective on the history of seeing and hearing in the classroom. First, they provide an unusually clear illustration of the way that ideals of teaching change. The first manuals used in the article were published in the 1820s and 1830s and deal with monitorial teaching, whereas the later manuals, published from the 1860s onwards, tend to focus on teacher-led lessons. Second, their advice on teaching methods are often very specific and detailed. This provides us with an equally detailed picture of life in the classroom as it was supposed to be. When it comes to the history of the sense of sound, I have also used school memoirs. There is a rich collection of such memoirs, offering accounts from the first half of the nineteenth century onwards, and a good few of the memoirists mention the aural experience of their own schooling.²

Sound, silence, schooling

‘Silence in class’ and similar expressions are associated with a general idea of the relationship between sound, silence and power. One recurring theme in the history of sound deals with the view of what constitutes unwanted sound. Peter Bailey (1996) argues that noise can be likened to dirt in Mary Douglas’s meaning of the word. Noise, like dirt, only arises when matter – in this case, sound – is out of place. Noise, in other words, is a form of disorder that, by implication, becomes associated with the creation of order; with the exercise of power. Noise abatement has often been associated with the idea of civilization triumphing over barbarism (e.g. Bijsterveld 2008). In this narrative, sound is linked to issues of social hierarchy. One example is Peter Burke’s study of the history of silence in early modern Europe, where we encounter women, children, and monks who were encouraged to show respect and deference by not speaking (Burke 1993). Other studies have pointed to noise as a form of resistance against power structures (Sizer 2015; Radovac 2015). Focusing on the opposite side of power hierarchies, R. Murray Schafer’s pioneering work claims that it is those in power who have had the right to generate a great deal of sound without being accused of making noise; something he calls “sacred noise” (Schafer [1994] 1977). Sacred noise was the limitless noise that the authorities were free to generate, in stark contrast to the silence of the subordinates. While this narrative intuitively seems to be consistent with a general ideal of the history of schooling – where pupils learned to be seen but not heard – there is another story to tell that complicates the relationship between noise and power.

The pupil noise of monitorial schools

The monitorial system of education, a worldwide success in the first half of the 19^th century, was based on the principle that one teacher, with the help of pupils as monitors, could teach many children at the same time (Caruso 2015; Larsson 2014). The fact that the instruction was to such a large extent done by the monitors meant that the teacher’s role in monitorial schools was small. The teacher’s duties were limited to “ceaseless supervision and the preservation of good order”, as one teaching manual put it (Rådberg 1820, 35). In other words, what was expected of the teacher was silence. This silence could even be described as a prerequisite for the proper direction of the school:

The teacher should rarely let his own voice be heard. All orders are given by the monitors. Without this, he would himself bring his system to naught and be unable to control a numerous school, while vainly exhausting his powers and damaging his health (Hagstedt 1821, 75).

While the teacher spoke little in this method, the pupils had all the more to say. This has been mentioned in several school memories about monitorial schools “Silence in the strict sense there never was; the nearest one approached it was during the hours of writing, when the teacher never spoke other than in a quieter bellow”, as one wrote (Johansson 1922, 71). Another former pupil remembered, along similar lines, that there was rarely complete silence: “It was almost never silent during lessons, neither was it expected by the teacher, nor was it possible to achieve” (Carlsson 1922, 32). This absence of silence was the result of the children reading aloud and the teacher rarely, if ever, teaching the children in person. With large classes, teacher-led instruction as a norm was most likely impossible. According to one contemporary advocate of the monitorial system, a teacher should only be expected to teach the children in person for four hours a week (Fryxell 1824, 20).

An interesting aspect of the sound of monitorial teaching is that the noise of learning co-existed with what was otherwise extremely strict, military discipline. An example of this is the widespread use of various words of command. Given the large number of pupils in some of the monitorial-system schools, teachers required techniques to make themselves heard or in other ways communicate with the children without having to use the spoken instructions said to tire both teachers and pupils alike. The teacher could, according to the manuals, stamp his foot, ring a bell, or gesture with his arms.

These techniques were used to coordinate the teaching; to indicate when the pupils should begin or finish a certain activity. The regulation of pupils’ movement seems to have been central, which must be seen in relation to the measure of mobility the method required. Pupils did not have individual places where they should always sit. Instead they moved to different places around the schoolroom according to the activity they were participating in, be it prayers or reading and writing lessons. These movements were tightly managed, whether it was getting the children to sit down or stand up at the same time, or marching in time to their places or out of the schoolroom. Even closing a book or folding one’s hands on one’s slate were among the actions that were regulated (Svensson 1823, 50). In the same way, the putting down of slates in an uncontrolled fashion was not permitted. The manuals detail the art of putting down a slate in a manner that would result in the desired sound. One describes how pupils should be trained to do this in two steps, and how the movement should sound: only a slight tap should be audible . Similarly, advice was given on the sound made by books being closed. One manual refers to an effect “not unlike the distant sound of a military salvo” (Svensson 1823, 50). The sound of the pupils putting their hands on the desks could also be regulated. One manual stressed that this was a movement that should be done on command, with audible results: “only one slap” should be heard (Rådberg 1820, 22). There were also different techniques for creating silence, but what the teaching manuals focused on were the intervals between actual lessons; those moments taken up with something other than learning as such. They appear to have been islands of silence in an ocean of noise. Silence was a parenthesis; it was something that was important when waiting for pupils to begin or to change task, but was not in general characteristic of the actual learning process.

School falls silent

In the 1850s-1860s the monitorial system fell out of fashion and was gradually replaced by teacher-led lessons. As this transformation took place, a new notion of discipline evolved in which pupils’ silence was to play a central role.

It was in 1864 that the official deathblow to the monitorial system was dealt. A royal circular of that year laid down the new, approved methods for mass education. Instead of gathering all the children in the same schoolroom, they were to be divided into different classes according to ability. As far as was possible, classes were to be taught in person by a teacher. The children were not to learn any lesson that the teacher had not previously presented and explained. This was a major change that would lay the basis for the long-lived class teaching method (Linné 2001).

In terms of sound, it is difficult to see the transition to class teaching as anything but dramatic, even if the change did not come overnight. Given that the teacher was now to address the pupils directly, it became possible to reverse the acoustic roles of the classroom: the teacher became associated with talking and the pupils with listening. This seems to imply that both teacher and pupils had to be re-educated in terms of how to conform to the new norms of sound and silence. The pupils had to learn to be silent; the teacher had to learn to talk.

The talking teacher

The new demands on the teacher meant that traditional ways of communicating with the school class became obsolete. The teacher was no longer to make himself heard by clapping, whistling, or stamping; instead, he was increasingly expected to use his own voice. The new demands this placed on the teacher are most evident in the crucial manual Bidrag till Pedagogik och metodik (Contributions to pedagogy and methods), first published in six volumes in 1868–1869 when the monitorial system was in retreat. Among other things, it stated that the teacher ought to adapt his language to the pupils’ level, ask the correct types of question, and learn how to explain things so that pupils both understood and were interested (Anjou, Kastman, and Kastman 1868–1969, vol. VI:34–42). In a subject such as biblical history, it was important that the teacher talked lucidly: he was encouraged to modulate his voice to the emotions and atmosphere conveyed in the story and pace his delivery accordingly, not forgetting such things as pauses and emphases, while facial expressions and gestures were to harmonize with the content of the narrative (Anjou, Kastman & Kastman, vol. II: 5). Among the broad qualifications for several subjects, the teacher’s voice was singled out as being central: “Using the voice’s modulation and general delivery, the teacher seeks to present the material in a vivid manner.” (Anjou, Kastman & Kastman vol. VI: 36). A manual from the 1910s spoke similarly of an ideal voice, while warning against going to extremes: “The voice should be serious, but not stern; soft, but not weak; clear, but not strident; expressive, but not affected” (Arcadius 1919, 133).

The voice’s strength was much emphasized as being vital to the new, talking teacher. In a teaching manual from 1875, it was stated that a teacher had to possess certain physical attributes, among them “a clear and powerful organ of speech” (Sandberg 1875, 74). Well into the twentieth century, the music teacher Annie Petersson maintained that “A good speaking voice is an invaluable asset for a teacher”, and stressed how much better it would be if “all who are dependent on speech in their daily business treated their vocal organs with the greatest care.” (Petersson 1938, 283). The importance ascribed to the voice is also confirmed by the admission requirements for Swedish teacher training colleges. As late as the 1950s, potential teachers with “Severe speech impediments” or “Frequently recurring, prolonged hoarseness” could be denied a place (Aktuellt från Skolöverstyrelsen 1958, 543).

The silent pupil

While the rise of class teaching meant that teachers had to develop their ability to talk, the opposite applied to pupils. Increasingly, they had to learn how to be silent. Among other things, this meant that pupils had to learn to avoid thinking out loud. This was an ability that, arguably, took decades to master. Two teaching manuals, published three decades apart, both stress that pupils should not be allowed to half-whisper when doing mental arithmetic (Anjou, Kastman & Kastman Anjou vol. VI:58; Martig 1903, 164).

Learning to be quiet was also a matter of learning to listen to the teacher and not to speak one’s mind. This was where putting up hands became central. True, it was not a class teaching innovation: in the monitorial system, it was recommended for pupils who needed to attract the teacher’s attention for permission to leave the room (e.g. Hagstedt 1821, 63). On the other hand, it does not seem to have been used to ensure the pupils took turns to speak; the pupils’ speaking order in the monitorial system followed set rules (e.g. Gerelius 1820, 73; Hagstedt 1821, 20). In class teaching, however, teachers began to expect pupils to put up their hands in order to determine the speaking order. This was a logical development when teaching became increasingly structured as an interaction between questioner and respondent, and as shared exercises became more common. Hand-raising became obligatory if the pupil wished to speak. The pupil in effect was asking permission to answer the teacher’s question. Just how this was to be achieved was an art in itself. In the 1860s, one teaching manual gave detailed instructions on the technique. Children who wanted to answer a question should make this apparent by “quietly raising two fingers of the right hand while resting the elbow on the table” (Anjou, Kastman, and Kastman 1868–1969, vol. VI: 58).

Hand-raising can be seen as an example of how a gesture alters meaning depending on whether the setting is quiet or noisy; after all, even in monitorial teaching different types of non-verbal communication were used by teachers and monitors. However, with the emergence of class teaching, the onus of non-verbal communication shifted away from the teacher to take a more prominent place in the pupils’ behaviour. Teachers no longer whistled, rang bells, stamped, or clapped their hands, while pupils increasingly were expected to put up their hands. The non-verbal system of signals now took on a reverse function. While the teacher in the monitorial system had used loud signals designed to be audible over the noise of the pupils, the new function of hand raising, being inaudible, was to maintain the silence of the classroom.

The transition from monitorial to class teaching brought with it a new type of discipline according to which the tolerance of sound from the pupils must have decreased dramatically. The teacher acquired a much more active role, while pupils to a growing extent were required to be the teacher’s silent audience. This role reversal increased the likelihood that pupils talking in class would be faced by an indignant teacher. Another consequence of the new classroom order was that teachers were encouraged to use their full vocal range to speak in a riveting manner, beginning to use emotionally coloured language. This development is reminiscent of James Johnson’s conclusion on music appreciation that the emergence of a silent concert audience coincided with a form of listening that was more emotional (Johnson 1995).

Seeing and surveillance

The shift from the monitorial system of education to teacher-led lessons can also be described in terms of vision. At the same time that the soundscape of schooling was deeply transformed, a similarly significant change occurred regarding the ways in which teachers and pupils were expected to look at each other. Partly this change had to do with surveillance, with new ways in which pupils were seen and controlled. But, as we will see, it also facilitated a new kind of resistance. Starting with a brief discussion of montorial schools, I will discuss how the emergence of whole-class teaching implied a certain way of visually controlling the classroom that at least partly went beyond Foucault’s idea of the panopticon (Foucault [1991] 1975).

Monitorial schools: a mobile teacher

If we first of all go back to the era of monitorial schools, we can see that surveillance was an important aspect of the teacher’s role. While much of the actual teaching was done by the monitors, it was a central task for the teacher to oversee the whole machinery. However, that surveillance required a quite specific technique. Given the large number of pupils, and the fact that some of the pupils were standing with their heads turned to face the walls, busy reading or doing maths using the tables hanging there, it was simply impossible for the teacher to see all the pupils to the same degree at the same time. Instead the teacher had to be mobile in order to monitor the children. This bodily movement was explicitly mentioned in teaching manuals.

“Wherever the teacher stands, sits or walks”, the teacher should, according to one manual, convey the impression that he could see and hear everything (Oldberg 1846, 112). Another manual argued that during the lessons the teacher should “go around the room and remain a while at one group, then another, to excite rivalry [..].” (Rådberg 1820, 30) In yet another manual, it was argued that the teacher eager to maintain order must be “nearly everywhere” and stressed the importance that the teacher “in his walks back and forth in the school room stops first here and then there, making neither monitors nor pupils feel secure, but instead unsure whether they at any minute will receive questions or injunctions [….].”(Svensson 1823, 64). Thus, while surveillance was a central task for the teacher, the technique for surveillance could not rest on the movements of the eyes alone. Successful surveillance rested on a constantly moving body. The act of monitoring was inseparable from the act of moving.

Whole-class teaching: a mobile gaze

That changed with the the rise of whole-class teaching which created new conditions for surveillance in the classroom. An important aspect of the transformation had to do with who was sitting or standing in the classroom. The practice of pupils standing in semi-circles (and other pupils sitting) was replaced by a classroom where all pupils were expected to sit at a school desk. The act of standing up thus became exceptional, and was from now on mainly associated with either entering/leaving the classroom, greeting the teacher or answering a question from the teacher. A lesson thus became synonymous with being seated, and the desks were supposed to be arranged in straight rows, in order to facilitate surveillance.

These new demands also had implications for the behaviour of teachers. According to several manuals, the teacher should remain seated, or at least be standing relatively still in class. The main reason for this had to do with the monitoring role of the teacher. The idea was that bodily movements of the teacher would hamper surveillance. Since the teacher should look at the children, one manual stressed, it was important that he chose his place in the classroom so that no children could escape his attention, and it was therefore also “highly inappropriate during instruction to walk to and fro in the school room, either in front of or in-between the children” (Sandberg 1875, 148f). These kinds of advice were expressed in several teaching manuals of the time (e.g. Martig 1903, 163; Lundqvist 1901, 247; Arcadius 1919, 166). The question of where the teacher chose to place his body in the classroom was apparently not a decision that could be handed over to the individual teacher. It seems to have been too important an issue to be left out from the manuals. On this point the message was clear: it was understandable that the teacher might be tempted to walk around the classroom during instruction, but most of the time such behaviour was inappropriate. Control of the class required a seated teacher – the era of patrolling the classroom was coming to its end.

Synopticon: making the teacher visible

The motive for placing the teacher at a fixed place in front of the blackboard or in his/her desk had to do with surveillance. However, it would be misleading to simply characterize the relationship between the teacher and the class as panoptic. The panoptical model is based on asymmetry, where the one who looks is invisible and in a power position. As Foucault expressed it: ”The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheral ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (Foucault [1991] 1975, 201f). This model does not apply very well to whole-class teaching, since it is a method where the teacher is constantly visible to the pupils. Borrowing from the terminology of Mathiesen (1997), a classroom like this is not really a panopticon, where a few watch the many, but rather a synopticon, a place where the many watch the few – in this case the teacher. What were the effects of that visibility?

Mathiesen argues that modern society should be seen as both a panopticon and a synopticon – a viewer society – and that both ways of seeing are parts of how power operates under modern conditions. Mathiesen describes these two ways of looking as opposites, but their effects are not. Instead he argues that synopticism, exemplified by the case of television, augments the power that Foucault ascribed to panopticism, since the former in contrast to the latter moulds consciousness on a deeper level. If we apply Mathiesen’s concept to the classroom, a space where teachers have often been highly visible to their pupils, it will however be obvious that we have to draw slightly different conclusions about the relationship between visibility and power than Mathiesen did. Whereas Mathiesen stressed how mass media mould our dreams and our soul through practices of looking, I will emphasize how the ability to see the teacher also could create conditions for resistance.

Teacher manuals and other kinds of advice to teachers commented on the implications of the constant visibility of the teacher. In the article “The eye in the school”, published in a journal for teachers, it was pointed out that the children could notice practically everything that the teacher did in the classroom. “The kids pay attention to how he comes into the school, how he greets, how he stands, how he sits, how he looks things up in his book, how he speaks” (Kastman 1889, 186). And, as a school inspector writing in a teacher journal stressed the same year, this made the teachers appearance extremely important. The fact that the teacher was always visible, meant that all aspects of his behaviour were potentially problematic. “Nothing is insignificant: the way we talk, carry ourselves, clothe ourselves, everything is given attention, everything takes root in very fertile ground” (Stenkula 1889, 17). Teaching manuals similarly advised the teacher to be aware of his/her appearance. Habitual movements, such as constantly putting on and taking off glasses, placing a finger on one’s nose and leaning back on a chair, should be avoided. The teacher should also make sure not to pull faces or overuse certain linguistic expressions (Hildinger 1944, 124). These kinds of advice persisted at least into the early 1960s. In a manual first published in 1961, it was pointed out that the teacher was “subject to quite intrusive and critical attention” and therefore should be “well kept in appearance and dress.” In addition, the teacher should be “aware of bad habits in terms of gestures of various types.” Juggling with the chalk, balancing the pointer or playing with a rubber band were examples of such inappropriate habits (Naeslund 1961, 135).

What all these examples demonstrate is that the panoptical model is insufficient if we want to understand resistance to power in whole-class teaching, since it is a setting where the gaze is anything but unidirectional.

At the same time the synoptical relation also created conditions for a certain kind of power, based on visibility. Being visible not only means being an object of criticism, ridicule and the like. It might also mean being an object of admiration, reminiscent of what Weber (1978) labelled charismatic authority. Every thinkable aspect of the teacher’s public behaviour in the classroom could contribute to that, even the gaze itself. A Swedish pedagogue and publisher, Carl Kastman, argued in the article “The eye in the school”, that the emotional qualities of the gaze were of fundamental importance. The gaze was not only something the teacher used in order to see; it was also something that communicated an emotional message that could be read by the pupils.

And who has not experienced how a teacher’s words have penetrated into the heart’s innermost depths, if they were accompanied by an expression of the eye […] Everything that is moving in the teacher’s soul: his love, his participation, his hope, his joy, his sadness, his disgust, his anger – all of this the child will notice in his eye […] (Kastman 1889, 183).

Such charismatic authority was of course not an automatic effect of being visible. Kastman also described teachers with a non-expressive gaze, which in its turn would prevent deeper learning: A teacher who taught “ever so powerfully, but with eyes expressionless and indifferent” would “not be able to exert any significant influence on the child’s mind.” (Kastman 1889, 183). But with the right teacher, and if the pupils directed their eyes towards the teacher, a kind of emotional transfer could occur, so that “the emotional strings that vibrate in the heart of the teacher, more easily can strike the corresponding strings in the children” (Kastman 1889, 185). The emotions of the teacher would thus become the emotions of the pupils:

If they see sorrow in the heart of the teacher, their own heart will be crying; if they detect happiness in his eyes, even they will rejoice; if his eyes bear evidence of trust and confidence, even they will be hopeful; if his eyes express briskness, even they will become brisk and open-faced (Kastman 1889, 185)

Charisma is an aspect of power that Foucault’s concept of panopticon fails to take into account. The panopticon implies a kind of automatic surveillance, independent of the personality of specific individuals. It was described by Foucault as machinery that nobody owned (Foucault 1980, 156) and as a machine that could be managed without any specific skills: “Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine” (Foucault [1991] 1975, 202). The panopticon, in other words, appears to have had no use at all of charismatic authority. By contrast, it is obvious that charismatic authority has played a pivotal role in the history of schooling, not least when it comes to maintaining discipline. Teachers have seldom been anonymous and invisible operators of a disciplinary machine; they have instead been highly visible people with names (or nicknames). This general rule also applies to the gaze. Some teachers possessed the power of the gaze, but some did not. According to one teacher manual, there was indeed a “wonderful power” in the gaze of a man of character, but other gazes were castigated (Sandberg 1875). Thus, the potential power effects created by the emergence of teacher-led lessons varied considerably.

Conclusion

The shift from the monitorial system of education to whole-class teaching implied a transformation of the roles of teachers and pupils and the way that social order was created in the space called classrooms. It was a shift that affected what constitutes norms and norm violations in schools, and resulted in new disciplinary techniques as well as new kinds of resistance. The monitorial system of education that prevailed during the first half of the 19^th century in Swedish elementary schools was characterized by a relatively high tolerance as regards pupil noise, given that the sounds of learning were an inevitable consequence of the way learning was organized. It was also a method where the pupils seldom were directly confronted with the appearance of the teacher and where the teacher had to wander around the classroom in order to see the pupils. With the rise of teacher-led lessons in the second half of the 19^th century, new ways of interacting ensued. From now on, the classroom was organised with school desks that faced the teacher, and both the pupils and the teachers were expected to be seated. The transformed mode of interaction encompassed pupils as well as teachers. While the pupils needed to learn new ways of looking and listening at the teacher, the teacher needed to develop an ability to speak to and look at the school class.

The ways in which the two methods diverge is a reminder that the school as a disciplinary institution is not static and homogenous. Classen (2014, 16) discusses the senses in disciplinary institutions like the factory, the prison, the army and the school. Drawing on McLuhan, she makes a parallel between the printed page and discipline. In the printed page the fluidity of speech was broken down into discreet units, and in classrooms and prisons, children and prisoners were similarly sitting in silent rows, “all legible, as it were, to the watching eyes of their supervisors”. This article has pointed out that such straight rows are not a universal feature of schooling. They are a product of historical circumstances and associated with transformations of teaching methods and norms about social interaction in the classroom.

The shift from the monitorial system of education to teacher-led lessons has been analyzed from the perspective of two senses. This raises the question of the relation between the two and what they taken together can illuminate regarding the history of discipline and schooling. The unifying feature of the senses of hearing and sight is that they are senses of distance. In contrast to touch, smell and taste they do not need physical proximity to work. Arguably, they are therefore adapted to social interaction in a classroom where physical proximity is hard to accomplish and often unwanted. And when it comes to understanding the nature of the distance senses it should be stressed that they are not merely introducing and mirroring social distance between individuals. They might equally well be described as capable of bringing about a connection, or even community, across distances. Corbin (1998) argued, in his history of bell ringing, that the bell could function as a symbol of social cohesion and community; it created a territorial identity for the people who lived in the range of its sound (see also Smith 1999 on acoustic communities). Further, the bell was an instrument of power, it was “the voice of authority”. The bell had a striking dominance over the acoustic world: “Within aerial space, over which it still held a monopoly, this bronze voice, falling from above, hammered home the injunctions of authority” (Corbin 1998, x-xi). In a similar manner, there is a relation between vision and community. Simmel ([1997] 1907, 116 f) speculated that an essential element of the unity that religions imply is that all people can simultaneously see the sky and the sun. Analogously we might describe the rise of teacher-led lessons in terms of an increased visual and aural dominance of the teacher in the classroom, affecting issues of power and community and the experience of the space called the classroom.

The two teaching methods described in this article can be seen as ideal types based primarily on normative sources, and the extent to which different classrooms have adhered to them in history has surely varied. If we look at them as ideal types that rest on different assumptions on how to interact in the classroom, it is also possible to apply them on subsequent developments in the history of schooling. Thus, developments in the 20^th century towards more progressive educational methods, based on more pupil activity and less direct guidance from the teacher, could perhaps partly be understood as a return to some of the principles of the early elementary schools. And in a similar way it would be possible to analyse current attempts at restoring the active teacher in terms of new norms for how to look and listen in the classroom. The history of schooling can thus partly be described in terms of a constant process of learning and re-learning about how to interact in the classroom.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Ian Grosvenor and Geert Thyssen as well as the two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joakim Landahl

Joakim Landahl is a professor of education at Stockholm University, where he leads the research group “History of education and sociology of education.” His current research includes the history of international comparisons of education and the role of crisis narratives in educational discourse. He is also interested in educational policy, especially the role of education ministers, and has written a biography of a Swedish minister of education (Fridtjuv Berg).

Notes

1. Elementary school teaching was originally a male profession in Sweden. In 1859 women were given the right to teach at elementary schools (Florin 1987).

2. The material began to be collected in the 1890s, when Sveriges Allmänna Folkskollärarförening (the Swedish Association of Elementary School-teachers) persuaded teachers to write their memoirs by holding a series of competitions. Later, a large number of these contributions were to be published in Årsböcker i svensk undervisningshistoria (the Swedish History of Education Yearbooks).