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Podcast: New Books in Education
Episode: Sarah Anne Carter, "Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Description: The metaphor “object lesson” is a familiar one, still in everyday use. But what exactly does the metaphor refer to?In her book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press, 2018), my guest Sarah Anne Carter reveals that object lessons were a classroom exercise, in wide use during the nineteenth century. She traces them from the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi, through his English adherents, to seemingly unlikely outposts of educational revolution as the Oswego, New York school system. And she takes the story into politics, advertising, and racial segregation....