Animal Magnetism and Curriculum History

Abstract

This article elaborates the impact that crises of authority provoked by animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis in the 19th century had for field formation in American education. Four layers of analysis elucidate how curriculum history’s repetitive focus on public school policy and classroom practice became possible. First, the article surveys external conditions of possibility for the enactment of compulsory public schooling. Second, “internal” conditions of possibility for the formation of educational objects (e.g., types of children) are documented via the processes of différance that were generated from within the experiences of confinement. Third, the article maps how these were interpenetrated by animal magnetic debates that were lustered and planished in education’s emerging field, including impact upon behavior management practices, the contouring of expertise and authority, the role of Will in intelligence testing and child development theories, and the redefinition of public and private. Last, the article examines implications for curriculum history, whether policy- or practice-oriented, especially around the question of influence, the theorization of child mind, and philosophies of Being.

Notes

Notes

1 Somnambulism technically referred to a state of sleepwalking, but was often used to refer to a hypnotic state before the term hypnosis was coined.

2 I prefer the later Foucaultian notion of ideas-in-action and the earlier notion of discursive regularities rather than theory/practice dichotomies. Theoretical concerns are, in this sense, practical events. Thus, I use interchangeably terms such debates/practices and ideas-practices when referring to debates in literature on animal magnetism, because the arguments were part of the “doing” around its emergence as an event and because the spirit/matter distinction was so overtly under contestation.

3 I thank John Richardson for insightful feedback on an earlier version of this article that enabled the linkage between these levels to be more explicitly drawn out.

4 This approach is more fully elaborated in Baker (2004). I focus in this paper on inscriptions of the child, deliberately forestalling consideration of late-19th-century inscriptions of the teacher as adult-in-waiting. I have discussed this relationality between child/adult and teacher education in Baker (2001).

5 These dimensions are paraphrased, condensed, and drawn from the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary.

6 Compulsory elementary schooling in this case refers to the legislation of compulsory attendance and not simply the provision of a school building, a teacher’s salary, or lessons.

7 For an elaboration of each of these conditions, see Baker (2004).

8 New terminology for describing humans emerges between 1830–1860 including Scientist– William Whewell, 1834; Hypnosis– James Braid, 1842; and norm, with the root based on a tool, the old carpenter’s square. Davis (1997) notes that norm and associated terms, including norm, normal, normalcy, normality, abnormal, and average, enter English dictionaries such as Johnson’s between 1840–1860.

9 Reports of such events during demonstrations and stage shows appear, for instance, in the appendices to Poyen’s 1833 translation of the French report.

10 For examples of school surveys with different principles of comparison and separation in the period, see Ayers (1909) and Hanus (1913). For an excellent discussion of the shift in foci, see Richardson (1993).

11 See Herbert Kliebard (1986/2004) for an account of the Committee of Ten controversy over the purposes of postelementary schooling.

12 For period accounts of this story and their conclusions about the interview, see Yost (1916) and Prince (1927). See also Henri Ellenberger’s (1970, p. 163) analysis of the event.

13 See Stephen Jay Gould’s discussion of the appropriation of Binet’s work in the United States in his 1981 The Mismeasure of Man.