When the idea of a large international exhibition first emerged in France and Great Britain around the middle of the nineteenth century, it was above all as an economic expedient. The new methods of production, communication, and transportation that had emerged in the previous decades had transformed the West from an agrarian to an urban and industrialized society. Industry and innovation had become the driving forces of a new social and moral order embedded in capitalism. By bringing together the world's industrial, political, and intellectual leaders, world exhibitions functioned as showplaces for the emerging global commodity culture and as platforms for the exchange of information and ideas.1 They were avidly used (by individuals, organizations, and official government bodies) to promote specific ideological and cultural views.2
In the last three decades, the ordering, culturally constructive aspect of these international exhibitions has received ample attention, and their ritual and economic importance has been widely acknowledged by scholars.3 Less well known is that, from 1862 onward world exhibitions included sections officially devoted to education.4 Moreover, these sections were in rapid expansion. By 1900, several hundred square meters were dedicated to showcasing the participating nations’ pedagogical models, school architecture, textbooks, and teaching aids. This steady expansion of the educational sections was triggered by intensifying contemporary debates on the organization of education. Societal transformations such as industrialization and the rise of the working and middle classes, urbanization, and the construction of nation-states prompted a profound rethinking of the role of public instruction.
Around the same time, a more visually oriented didactic established itself in Europe and the United States. Older pedagogical principles had endorsed a text- and speech-oriented approach to teaching. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, educational reformers advocated a child-oriented, sensory style of learning.5 They argued that knowledge was transferred more effectively when children were encouraged to touch, observe, hear, and even smell the objects, processes, or phenomena they were studying. If direct observation proved impossible, models, illustrations, and projected images were considered good alternatives.6 At a time when administrations in various countries set up new school systems or contemplated reforming existing ones, world exhibitions were ideal spaces for the circulation of new ideas and pedagogical practices. Although education systems mostly took shape in separate, usually national, political, and bureaucratic spaces, they were used by educational reformers as a framework for study, encounter, and comparison.7 This framework allowed them to assess gaps and areas for improvement, to study the possible solutions to them, or to find inspiration to legitimize proposals for reform.8
During the last two decades, industry-led promotional efforts and governmental initiatives to introduce commercially produced media into the classroom have received increasing attention from media historians and historians of education.9 They have addressed the promotion and introduction in Western education of high-profile educational technology such as film, radio, television, and computers10 and of less technical, yet for their time equally novel, visual aids such as wall charts, geographical maps, and textbook illustrations.11 These studies shed light on the discourse and priorities of producers, educational reformers, and policymakers. However, they largely overlook the transnational influences at play in governmental initiatives to introduce this medium into the classroom.
This article examines whether and how Belgian representatives adopted ideas about, and showcased the use of, lantern projection for educational purposes at world exhibitions held in Belgium and elsewhere as part of their visions about the future of education. Once predominantly used as a source of entertainment at fairs, in theaters, and at home, by the second half of the nineteenth century the optical lantern had become a widespread means of communication for propagandistic and educational purposes by learned societies, social organizations, religious groups, adult societies, and universities.12 This turned the projection lantern from a source of entertainment into an instrument of science. In combination with the increasing availability of photographic lantern slides, which enabled the projectionist to show nearly anything imaginable in great detail, this shift in use led to discussions about the usefulness of lantern projection in the classroom.
This article revisits the years between 1878 and 1914 as a period of, one the one hand, heated debate between Catholics and Liberals (members of the Liberal Party in Belgium) over the organization of Belgian education and, on the other, of prolonged international discussion between teachers, policymakers, and educational experts concerning the usefulness of optical technologies for the modernization of pedagogical and didactic practices. It investigates the effect of the circulation, adaptation, and contestation of cross-border ideas and innovations on their views and discussions. By doing so, it aims to contribute both to our understanding of world exhibitions as mediators of educational reform and to the existing scholarship on technological innovation in the classroom.
By focusing on the debates between producers, educational reformers, and policymakers at world exhibitions, this article provides added insight into the normative discourses of the time about educational media technology. These cast teachers as tech-savvy facilitators of modern multisensory learning. However, it is also important to pay attention to teachers’ user agency and to consider the various ways in which teachers have selected, modified, or worked around educational technologies.13 Although this article does not primarily focus on teachers’ agency and the difficulties teachers met in the practical day-to-day use of the projection lantern,14 it adds to our understanding of the slow implementation of visual media and especially more high-profile media technology such as the optical lantern. It does so by comparing the idealized accounts of Belgian educational organization and practices as presented at the world exhibitions with the triennial inspection reports, governmental recommendations to teachers, and the criticism voiced by the political opposition in Belgium.
Theory and Methodology
In the last few decades, many scholars in the history of education have demonstrated that modern school systems are the result of intense cultural exchanges across borders. Trans- and international nongovernment agents, international conferences and exhibitions, and scientific journals have played an important role in the processes of circulation, interaction, and exchange that have shaped global knowledge as well as national education practices, systems, and policies.15 Moreover, transfer always implies a transformation of the object(s) and the associated practice(s) and ideas as they are transmitted to a new cultural context.16
Belgium makes for a fascinating case study to demonstrate the importance of transnational communication in the history of education for several reasons. First, this is because contemporary national discourse identified French and German influence as an essential characteristic of the national state school system.17 Second, the internationalist discourse about education that gained a foothold in Belgium in the final decades of the nineteenth century further increased interest in cross-cultural understanding and the mutual exchange of knowledge.18 Third, during the period under investigation there was a wide rift between Catholics and Liberal freethinkers in Belgium. Each group wished to see their respective worldviews imposed on the wider population and aimed to bind the Belgian state to their own project. Education was one of the main battlegrounds in this culture war.19
In order to investigate the transnational circulation of educational knowledge at world exhibitions and its impact on Belgian educational exhibits between 1878 and 1914, this study adopts a micro-perspective, focusing on the role of individual historical actors and their interests and strategies. This requires an analysis of their institutional and ideological affiliations as well as their backgrounds and interests. It allows us to shift the focus away from the national realm and to take into account the international networks that the educational experts that shaped Belgian educational exhibits were a part of. Of course, these experts’ activities could still be mainly confined to the national level, and many acted as representatives of their national government.
The findings presented in the following pages draw mainly upon contemporary published sources. Exhibition catalogues, compiled either by national commissions or smaller bodies such as ministries of education, offer an overview of the exhibited items, either from all participating countries in a section or from one country in particular. Ministries also produced historical accounts of the educational systems in their countries or regions. National or international commissions or national education experts published reports on the educational sections of the expositions. These reports provide us with a perspective on the state of the art in all aspects of education presented at the world exhibitions and often also offer a comparative view of the national exhibits. International conferences taking place within the context of these large international events also produced useful sources, such as programs and conference proceedings. Periodical publications launched calls for participation in the educational exhibits and reported on them, whereas memoirs of individual actors sometimes include reflections on participation in or visits to the educational sections of world exhibitions. In order to get a more complete overview of which visual teaching aids were recommended or provided to teachers, this study draws on publications by Belgian educational media advocates as well as on governmental recommendations, discussions in inspection reports, reports from the Chamber, and catalogues of recommended teaching aids and materials.
The Liberal Push for a National School Museum
The organization of world exhibitions was explicitly based on the principle of education via direct viewing of the exhibited objects, technologies, and phenomena. This encouraged the visiting public to evaluate and compare the progress of nations and their representatives.20 The approach reflected the emergence and establishment of a new, more visually oriented didactics in both Europe and the United States.
Around the same time the world exhibitions had made their first appearance, progressive educationalists had begun calling for a move beyond the traditional, text-oriented teaching methods. The verbalism and memorization that characterized the latter were now thought to encourage passivity in pupils and to yield insufficient results. Educational experts argued for more experiential and sensory forms of learning, claiming that knowledge was transferred more efficiently when learners were stimulated to actively study the objects or phenomena using all of their senses. Teachers were encouraged to make their classes more active and intuitive for their pupils by taking on an approach based on experimentation and the study of natural objects, models, wall charts, and other illustrations of various kinds. This “visual turn” therefore also encouraged the introduction of teaching aids, including visual technologies such as light projection, into teaching routines.21
As a result, by the 1870s many countries were contemplating the establishment of national school museums in order to offer teachers the opportunity to borrow teaching aids and receive further training in the new way of teaching. At the same time, the continually increasing scope and cost of the education exhibits led experts to question their long-term utility. Consequently, objects that had been entered into world exhibitions would form the basis of the collections of various school museums, such as the Pedagogical Museum of the Russian military schools in Saint Petersburg, the permanent exhibition of school material in Vienna, and the Royal Museum of Instruction and Education in Rome.22
Inspired by these predecessors, Belgian educators began to organize a similar national educational museum in Belgium, and by the time Belgium received the invitation to participate in the world exhibition to be held in Paris in 1878, the idea had matured.23 This was in large part the result of lobbying by the Ligue de l'enseignement, a highly influential teaching league and Liberal pressure group.24 From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, progressive Liberals strove to reform education on the basis of their own rationalist beliefs in science as a driving force behind not only individual but also societal progress. Public secular education, they argued, should accord an important place to science in the curriculum and be accessible to all. Their pedagogical views were based on positivist epistemology, in which children were encouraged to observe and study natural phenomena and objects using all of their senses.25 This “active-intuitive” method, as they called it, tied in with the visual turn in education and was believed to contribute to a valorization of objectivity. Reason, the progressive Liberals argued, was the basis of universal morality. Therefore, nonconfessional education had to become a priority. In order to encourage discussion and further the secularization, extension, and improvement of Belgian public education, the progressive Liberals created the Ligue de l'enseignement in 1864.26
In order to apply the principles formulated by the Ligue in a fruitful way, every school needed a school museum (a collection of objects such as mounted animals, minerals, wall charts, maps, and plant specimens). This idea was not new. State normal schools had been organizing their own, albeit modest, school museums since the mid-1840s. In 1862, at the request of the Catholic government, Thomas Braun,27 a professor of pedagogy and methodology at the State Normal School of Nivelles, had assembled a school museum to be put on display at the world exhibition in London.28 However, the sensorial teaching method the progressive Liberals had in mind required a much greater amount and diversity of teaching aids than had been previously deemed necessary for efficient instruction. The emphasis placed on the natural sciences also demanded the acquisition of other, often expensive equipment for physics and chemistry cabinets, including optical lanterns.29
The Liberals sharply criticized the exhibits that had been put together at the request of the Catholic government for participation in the world exhibitions. The one presented at the 1876 world exhibition in Philadelphia, however, was considered the most ludicrous by those in favor of modern public instruction. It consisted of a hypermodern model school, perfectly equipped according to the principles of the new active-intuitive pedagogy and was also completely fictional, for no such school existed in Belgium. Aware that it would prove impossible, in the short run, to convince the Catholic government to supply all Belgian schools with such a complete set of didactic materials, in 1877 Auguste Couvreur argued in Parliament for the creation of a national school museum.30
Couvreur was one of the founding members of the International Association for the Progress of the Social Sciences (Association internationale pour le progrès des sciences sociales). In 1864, he was elected as deputy for the Liberal Party, a function he would occupy for the next twenty-five years. Between 1878 and 1880, he was president of the Ligue de l'enseignement.31 A national school museum, Couvreur contended in his address to the Chamber, would be extremely useful since it could offer schools an overview of the latest teaching aids, test and compare them, and subsequently offer advice on their acquisition and use. Couvreur explicitly referred to the Pedagogical Museum of the Russian military schools in Saint Petersburg, whose exhibit he and many of his fellow members of Parliament had visited at the Brussels international exhibition on hygiene of 1876, as an example of best practice. In response, Charles Delcour, the Catholic interior minister, stated that he had no doubt that such a museum would yield excellent results in Belgium. However, he added that the government had already made its own contribution to promoting intuitive teaching methods by sending out circular letters and recommendations on teaching aids.32
Following the Russian Example: Introducing the Optical Lantern
When the Liberal Party won the elections in 1878, they created a Ministry for Public Instruction.33 Pierre Van Humbeéck, the new minister of education, immediately set out to modernize and secularize primary and secondary education following the principles formulated by the Ligue, of which he was a prominent member. He set out to create a state school museum (musée scolaire d’état). The Belgian entry for the Paris world exhibition of 1878 would form the basis of the museum collection. Since the Liberal government took office in June, at which time the exhibition had already been open for a month, the Belgian exhibit on education was still very much the product of the previous, Catholic government. As a last-minute intervention, however, Van Humbeéck asked Thomas Braun and Charles Buls to take on the organization of the section on primary education together. By then, Braun had been appointed head of inspection of the state normal schools and had, at the government's request, undertaken several trips abroad to study foreign educational institutions.34 Buls was municipal councilor of Brussels (from 1877 to 1878 and from 1900 to 1903) and secretary general of the Ligue. He would become alderman for public education in Brussels (from 1879 to 1881), mayor of Brussels (from 1881 to 1899), a member of parliament (from 1882 to 1884 and from 1886 to 1894), and the president of the Ligue (from 1880 to 1883 and from 1905 to 1914).35
The Russian school museums, and the Pedagogical Museum of the Russian military schools in Saint Petersburg in particular, served as models for both the organization and the scope of the collections of the Belgian state school museum. In his extensive comparative report on the various exhibits on primary education at the 1878 Paris exhibition, Braun expressed his admiration for the way in which the Saint Petersburg museum stayed up to date with the most recent developments in education and in instructional technology in particular. He spoke with great interest of the collection of four hundred lantern slides and projection material in the Saint Petersburg museum and discussed the network of agents the museum had set up in order to gain an overview of all the educational material produced in Russia and abroad, and to buy the most important items.36
In order to learn from his experience, the president of the Pedagogical Museum in Saint Petersburg, General W. de Kokhowski, was invited by Couvreur and Van Humbeéck to the Brussels International Congress on Education that was held to mark the inauguration of the state school museum on 24 August 1880. A couple of months prior, and following de Kokhowski's example,37 Van Humbeéck had launched an international competition for school materials for primary teacher training colleges.38 He had deemed this initiative necessary after the inspection report of 1879 had demonstrated that none of the state normal schools for primary teacher training disposed of the necessary equipment to allow for the more visually and experiential teaching that was a crucial part of the new normal school program to be launched in 1881.39 In April 1881, a selection was made of the instruments and objects submitted, and in the fall of that year the Ministry of Public Instruction provided all state normal and secondary schools with an optical lantern, a stereoscope, and various other educational media.40
Lantern slides, however, were not included. Presumably, the idea was to equip schools with a projector and to have them borrow the lantern slides from the state school museum. During the International Congress on Education of 1880, de Kokhowski had explained how the lantern slide collection of the Saint Petersburg museum had multiplied more than tenfold over the course of two years to 4,500 painted slides, due to the great demand by schools. He had argued that most schools could not be expected to buy the expensive slides themselves and that it was the museum's responsibility to fill the need. According to de Kokhowski, up to forty Saint Petersburg schools made use of this service multiple times a year, proving its need.41 However, it would take nearly twenty more years for the first Belgian slide-lending services to be established (see below).
The use of lantern projection was recommended for science instruction, but especially for making geography lessons more captivating and less abstract. The new normal school program of 1881 prescribed that geography teachers should motivate trainee teachers by incorporating interesting anecdotes, images, field trips, and slide projections into their lessons.42 This decision might have been prompted by a highly publicized lecture by the geologist Stanislas Meunier and the optical lantern manufacturer Albert Molteni during the 1880 pedagogical conference in Paris, which demonstrated the usefulness of the lantern for normal school education. None of the sources mention this explicitly, unfortunately. However, when Eduard Verschaffelt, Director of the Ghent Normal School, wrote up a how-to guide on lantern projection for his fellow teachers, his account of the projection of scientific experiments, moving astronomical slides and micro- and telescopic photographs, bore a striking resemblance to that lecture.43 His guidelines were published in December 1881 (shortly after the distribution of the optical lanterns) in L'Abeille, the pedagogical journal edited by Thomas Braun, with support of the Liberal government.44
Catholic Cutbacks and the Art of Making Do
Despite the clear interest in the optical lantern evident in the discussions and official reports mentioned above and the distribution of optical lanterns among state normal and secondary schools, the instrument remained absent from Belgian exhibits on education at the international exhibitions during Liberal reign. There are several explanations for this. First, there were no Belgian producers of optical lanterns or lantern slides at the time, and countries rarely displayed objects made in other countries. Second, and maybe more importantly, according to the teachers themselves, the lantern was still rarely taken out of its protective wooden case.
Notwithstanding the popularity of the new policy's emphasis on the active-intuitive teaching method among policymakers and pedagogues, teachers were not immediately won over by it. Likewise, the lantern's history as both a children's toy and a device used in traveling phantasmagoria shows made some teachers wary of its use in Belgian classrooms. Moreover, lantern projection required quite some technical knowledge, the outfitting of classrooms with blackout curtains and projection screens, and the acquiring of lantern slides suitable for educational use. It was, in other words, a costly and time-consuming endeavor.45
Consequently, the focus on the introduction of the active-intuitive method in Belgian education had, above all, resulted in a strong emphasis on teacher- and student-made teaching aids. This was reflected in the exhibitions of handmade materials that formed the core of each of the Belgian educational sections of the 1870s and 1880s. According to Braun, it was best practice to have students and teachers make their own teaching aids. In his words, “the great benefit to be gained from these small museums is not to have them, but to compile them.”46 During the Brussels International Congress on Education, Alexis Sluys, a freemason, prominent Belgian educationalist, and principal of the Brussels model school,47 insisted that “the way for this active intuitive teaching method to produce the greatest results is to train the children to assemble collections and make the learning aids themselves.”48
The focus on handmade teaching aids continued after June 1884, when the Catholic Party swept back into power with a landslide victory. The Catholics would remain in power until 1914. The Ministry for Public Instruction was abolished, and education was again subsumed into the Ministry of Interior Affairs. In the new curriculum that was introduced as soon as the Catholic government took office, the natural sciences were made an optional subject. In addition, Van Humbeéck's Catholic successors largely cut the generous subsidies for teaching aids previously accorded to state-supported schools. Catholic schools, on the other hand, now received a larger allocation for the expansion of their museum collection.49 The campaign to provide state normal and secondary schools with all the educational media necessary for intuitive science instruction, such as the projection lantern, was abandoned.50
However, the Catholic government did not dismiss all the initiatives of their Liberal predecessors out of hand. The government strongly advised teachers to incorporate visual didactic materials into their classroom practices. The state normal school curriculum of 1885 still required geography lessons to be enlivened with lantern projection. In fact, each normal school was now explicitly requested to include a number of slide sets in its collection, and every teacher trainee had to acquire basic knowledge about the projection lantern. The State School Museum was renamed the National School Museum (Musée scolaire nationale) and reorganized to focus exclusively on normal school and primary instruction51 Auguste-Joseph Germain, former director general of the Ministry of Public Instruction under Van Humbéeck and author of the 1880 curriculum, was appointed as the first official director of the museum.52 Yet even the National Museum encouraged teachers to adopt a “do it yourself” approach by frequently organizing competitions for teacher-made tools, the best of which were rewarded with a place in the museum's collection.53
The Optical Lantern Becomes Unavoidable
In 1888, a Grand International Competition of Science and Industry (Grand concours international des sciences et de l'industrie) was organized in Brussels at the instigation of Léon de Somzée, a successful industrialist and independent representative of the people for the district of Brussels.54 Charles Buls, as burgomaster of Brussels, was appointed honorary president of the executive committee of the international competition, whereas the director of the National School Museum, Joseph-Auguste Germain, took on the role of vicepresident of the section on education.55
The subcommittee on primary education wrote up a list of all the issues thought to be most relevant to discuss during the competition. While points six and seven stressed the need to display a collection of teaching aids that could be compiled “at low cost” (à peu de frais), point fourteen emphasized the need to “research the benefits that the use of the magic lantern [sic] and light projections could bring to primary education.” In line with the focus on low-cost teaching aids, however, it was added that the projector to be put on display during the international exhibition should be “the most adequate projection device among modestly priced projectors” (l'appareil de projections le plus convenable parmi ceux d'un prix modique). The goal was also to display a series of lantern slides apt for use in education,56 which were a scarce commodity at the time, according to education experts and teachers.57
A year later, at the 1889 universal exhibition held in Paris, lantern projection was presented as a separate category – not, however, as part of the section on education, but rather within the section on photography. Despite this apparent recategorization, the general rapport indicates that projectors were primarily “intended for classes and conferences.”58 In Belgium at least, the number of teachers making use of the lantern must have still been low, for during the following decade, several teachers from state schools formulated ardent pleas for its incorporation into their classroom routine. They argued that the lantern's usefulness for educational purposes went beyond science instruction and that it could be used to enliven any type of lesson, especially now that photographic lantern slides were so widely available.59
Their efforts to convince both their fellow teachers and the government to finally follow up on the Liberals’ initiative of 1881 to promote lantern projection in the classroom finally yielded results in the late 1890s. The triennial government report on normal school education for the years 1897 to 1899 raised the question of why the optical lantern was not used more frequently.60 To resolve this issue, in November 1899 the Catholic minister of interior affairs and public instruction, Jules de Trooz, issued a circular stating that secondary school lessons in history, geography, and the natural sciences should make use of the optical lantern.61 Moreover, for the first time, the ministry endorsed a collection of one hundred slides for history teaching for use in primary schools.62
The universal exhibition held in Paris in 1900 offered teachers and educationalists who wished to use lantern projection for educational purposes a lot of inspiration and examples of good practices. The French Ministry of Public Instruction had reserved a large hall (the salle de projection) in the Palace of Education (Palais de l’éducation) for light projection. It put the spotlight on the rapidly growing number of slides offered by the French State Pedagogical Museum (Musée pédagogique de l’état) in Paris, which had established a lending service for lantern slides in 1896. By 1900, the Pedagogical Museum had collected nearly 33,000 slides, or approximately 3,500 different series. According to one of the graphs on display, the number of series borrowed by schools rose from approximately 8,000 a year in 1896 to nearly 27,000 by 1900. Although commercial producers of lantern projectors and slide series, such as Molteni, were represented as well, teacher-made slides took center stage.63
The exhibit about the French national slide-lending service was met with admiration and slight envy by Belgian lantern enthusiasts. At the International Congress for Middle School Education (Congrès international de l'enseignement moyen) organized in Brussels one year later under the patronage of de Trooz, the potential of lantern slide projection as an “intuitive” teaching aid was hotly debated. Véron De Deyne,64 a state middle-school science teacher and fervent lantern advocate, reminded his audience that the Ministry of Public Instruction had already equipped schools with optical lanterns twenty years earlier. De Deyne attributed the failure of this initiative to the lack of suitable and affordable lantern slides.65 De Deyne further recommended that the government take on the task of providing schools with the necessary slide series. The French slide-lending service of the Pedagogical Museum proved that this could be organized efficiently and with great success. To substantiate his point, De Deyne referred to the numbers and graphs about the Pedagogical Museum's slide collections and loans that had been on display during the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition.66
In the wake of the exhibition, several Belgian slide-lending services saw the light of day. Most were local initiatives, however.67 A nationwide survey, conducted by De Deyne on behalf of de Trooz in early 1901, concluded that many state schools already had an optical lantern in their collection.68 Reassured that the financial expense would not be too high, the government now provided subsidies to help schools complete or modernize their projectors.69 But investments in a national lending service were put on the backburner.
At the 1910 Brussels Universal Exhibition, lantern projection finally formed an integral part of the Belgian section on education. Photographs showed the optical lanterns used in Belgian state higher and normal school education. The exhibition presenting the state of natural science instruction in Belgium included the much-applauded projection equipment made by Liège state secondary school physics teacher George Kemna,70 which allowed for the live projection of science experiments. Also on display were the innovative slide projectors developed by Robert Goldschmidt, a Belgian chemist, physicist, and engineer. They allowed the teacher, after having put an entire slide series in the apparatus, to switch between slides with the mere push of a button.71
Smoke and Mirrors?
Nevertheless, the educational exhibits of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were heavily criticized by the Belgian Liberals. For the entire duration of Catholic Party rule, the Liberals would accuse the Catholic government of reducing the active-intuitive method to a formal affair instead of actively challenging students to think for themselves. Moreover, the eminent pedagogue and founding member of the Ligue Alexis Sluys claimed that large parts of the Belgian exhibits of the early twentieth century were nothing more than smoke and mirrors and that “a large part of the collections of material for intuitive teaching exhibited there were never even part of the didactic material of the schools from which they reportedly came.”72 One of the few elements of the Belgian display during the 1910 Universal Exposition that could count on Sluys's approval consisted of the projectors made by Kemna and Goldschmidt. These projectors allowed pupils to conduct or view science experiments on their own without nearly any interference form the teacher and were therefore the perfect active-intuitive learning aid.73
It comes as no surprise then that lantern projection also took center stage during the International Congress on Public Education, organized by the Ligue de l'enseignement during the 1910 Universal Exposition. The teachers and educationalists present agreed that projection lanterns offered multiple possibilities for intuitive, lively, and memorable instruction. It was agreed that all public schools should be equipped with the apparatus and a designated projection room. It was also stressed that, following the example of France, Belgium needed to organize a central lending service dedicated exclusively to light projection. The Ligue de l'enseignement had already amassed over 8,500 slides that could be put at the disposal of teachers. Moreover, it was also deemed necessary to include educational films in instruction. The rationale behind this decision was that moving images, which showed things in their natural habitat and in all their detail, would be an even greater improvement in intuitive teaching than the projection of fixed images.74
The growing popularity of commercial cinema in the first decade of the 1900s also led to more debate on the educational usefulness of the optical lantern. Belgian pedagogical journals published articles on the “cinema plague,” arguing that while cinema was not a bad medium in itself, it was bad for children's eyes and nerves, and the themes it often depicted jeopardized their moral development. The further introduction of optical lantern sessions, some contended, could be an important weapon in this “war” against harmful films.75 Indeed, the breakthrough of film ushered in a new chapter in the discussion about the educational use of light projectors.
Conclusion
By putting the materiality of education on display, the world exhibitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries presented contemporary observers with the opportunity to evaluate their country's educational developments by comparing them with those of other “civilized” nations. This case study clearly demonstrates the tension, felt by Belgian educationalists and politicians, between their wish to learn from foreign educational practices in order to construct their own visions for the future of education and their urge to present the Belgian educational system to an international audience as superior. It therefore contributes to our understanding of world exhibitions as mediators of educational reform and as perfect platforms from which to propagate and legitimize ideas about the role and organization of public instruction.
The Belgian Liberals, in their struggle to establish and consolidate modern public and nonconfessional education, eagerly referenced foreign models in an attempt to shake the educational tree. They looked for and found ammunition in international exhibits to contest the prevailing Catholic orthodoxies surrounding the organization, didactic practices, and subject matter of Belgian education. The laborious and slow introduction of the optical lantern into Belgian education can be seen as emblematic of this classroom culture war between Catholics and Liberal freethinkers. Though the optical lantern was initially promoted as an instrument to facilitate science instruction by the Liberals, subsidies for its acquisition were cut as soon as the Catholics took office, when science was made an optional subject. During the entire duration of Catholic rule, public instruction was treated in a rather stepmotherly manner, whereas investments in Catholic schools rose steadily. Moreover, it was during this period that the consolidation of the organization of education also largely took place. Institutionalization seemed to be completed, so the need to look for inspiration abroad was less felt.
These findings add to our understanding of the reasons for the slow implementation of visual media and especially more high-profile media technology such as the optical lantern. They also demonstrate how the “grammar of schooling” (the long-lasting, unchanging core elements of schooling that, according to David Tyack and Larry Cuban, dictate pedagogical practice)76 was not only the result of the unwillingness of teachers to embrace innovation. Rather, this article shows how it was also the outcome of the ideological struggle between political parties that wished to see their opposing worldviews imposed on the wider population.
However, even under Catholic rule the peer pressure at world exhibitions resulted in Belgian exhibits showcasing the innovative nature of the Belgian education system, not least because the prosperity of a country was increasingly measured by the state of public instruction. As a result, it was only when France, which had a large cultural impact in Belgium, fully embraced educational projection technology and made it one of the highlights of the 1900 exhibition that this technology was finally placed on the agenda by the Belgian Catholic minister of public instruction. An additional contributing factor was that the lantern was now promoted as having the potential to enliven lessons in every discipline, not solely in science (an argument that was also made by a growing group of lantern enthusiast teachers). This transformation from scientific apparatus to versatile visual teaching aid finally heralded the more widespread support for and adoption of the optical lantern for educational use in Belgium.
Lastly, it is important to note that, despite the ideological tensions, priorities, and preoccupations that played a part, there is also a strong continuity in the people and ideas that shaped Belgian representatives’ attitudes and actions concerning the promotion of lantern projection for educational use during the period under consideration. The politician's and contemporary educationalist's trust in and respect for people such as Charles Buls, Thomas Braun, and Joseph-Auguste Germain, as well as for the principles of the active-intuitive method, remained a constant under both Liberal and Catholic rule. This proves the importance of an approach that focuses on the role of individual historical actors and ideas and the networks of which they were a part, as opposed to an exclusive focus on the national level when studying educational reform and the phenomenon of world exhibitions.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen (FWO) and the Fonds de la recherche scientifique – FNRS under EOS Project No. 30802346, 2018–2023.
Notes
Eugene F. Provenzo, Culture as Curriculum: Education and the International Expositions (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 3.
Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2; Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World Fairs: San Francisco's Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Lowie Museum of Anthropology, 1983).
See, for example, Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4 (1988): 73–102 and Pieter Van Wesemael, Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio-historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1789–1851–1970) (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001).
This topic has been explored in recent years. See, for example, Klaus Dittrich, “Experts Going Transnational: Education at World Exhibitions during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” PhD diss., (University of Portsmouth, 2010); Mari Hiraoka, “Transnational Information Flow and Domestic Concerns: Japanese Educational Exhibits in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries in Britain,” in Transnational Perspectives on Curriculum History, ed. Gary McCulloch, Ivor Goodson, and Mariano González-Delgado (London: Routledge, 2020), 108–130; Damiano Matasci, “Les peuples à l’école: Expositions universelles et circulation des idées pédagogiques en Europe (1867–1878)” [People at school: world's Fairs and the circulation of pedagogical ideas in Europe (1867–1878)], Revue d'histoire du XIXe siècle [19th century history review] 55, no. 2 (2017): 125–136, https://doi.org/10.4000/rh19.5330; Martin Lawn, Modelling the Future: Exhibitions and the Materiality of Education (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2009); and Provenzo, Culture as Curriculum.
Dominique Grootaers, “Belgische schoolhervormingen in het licht van de ‘éducation nouvelle’ (1870–1970)” [Belgian school reforms in the light of the “New Education” (1870–1970)], Jaarboek voor de geschiedenis van opvoeding en onderwijs [Yearbook for the history of childhood and education] (2001): 9–33, here 9–15; Katie Day Good, Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).
Grootaers, “Belgische schoolhervormingen,” 14; Marc Depaepe et al., Order in Progress: Everyday Educational Practice in Primary Schools, Belgium, 1880–1970 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000), 55.
Dittrich, “Experts Going Transnational”; Matasci, “Les peuples à l’école.”
Dittrich, “Experts Going Transnational,” 19.
Meredith Bak, “Democracy and Discipline: Object Lessons and the Stereoscope in American Education, 1870–1920,” Early Popular Visual Culture 10, no. 2 (2012): 147–167, https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2012.664746; Good, Bring the World to the Child; Eckhardt Fuchs, Anne Bruch and Michael Annegarn-Gläß, “Educational Films: A Historical Review of Media Innovation in Schools,” Journal of Education Media, Memory and Society 8, no. 1 (2016): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.3167/jemms.2016.080101; Valérie Vignaux, “Le film fixe Pathéorama (1921) ou généalogie d'une invention” [The still film Pathéorama (1921) or genealogy of an invention], Trema 41 (2014): 36–43, https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01301999.
William Bianchi, Schools of the Air: A History of Instructional Programs on Radio in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008); Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Anne Quillien, ed., Lumineuses projections: la projection fixe educative [Luminous projections: the educational fixed projection] (Chasseneuil-du-Poitou: Réseau Canopé, 2016); and Robert J. Taggart, “The Promise and Failure of Educational Television in a Statewide System: Delaware, 1964–1971,” American Educational History Journal 34, no. 1/2 (2007): 111–122, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ818490.
Karl Catteeuw, “Als de muren konden spreken . . . Schoolwandplaten en de geschiedenis van het Belgisch lager onderwijs” [If the walls could speak . . . School wall plates and the history of Belgian primary education], PhD diss. (KU Leuven, 2005); Sirke Happonen, “On Representation, Modality and Movement in Picture Books for Children,” in Visual History: Images of Education, ed. Ulrike Mietzner, Kevin Meyers and Nick Peim (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 55–84; Pontus Hennerdal, “Educational Ideas in Geography Education in Sweden during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: The Relationship between Maps and Texts,” International Research in Geography and Environmental Education 24, no. 3 (2015): 258–272, https://doi.org/10.1080/10382046.2015.1034460; Reinhard Stach, “Wandbilder als didaktische Segmente der Realität” [Murals as didactic segments of reality], Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (2000): 199–224, https://doi.org/10.1080/0030923000360110.
Frank Kessler, “Researching the Lantern,” in A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slides in the History of Learning, ed. Sarah Dellmann and Frank Kessler (London: John Libbey Publishing, 2020), 13–19; Laurant Mannoni, “Plaque de verre ou celluloïd? Lanterne magique et cinéma: la guerre d'indépendance” [Glass plate or celluloid? Magic lantern and cinema: the war of independence], Revue d'histoire du cinema 7 (1990): 3–27, https://www.persee.fr/issue/1895_0769-0959_1990_num_7_1.
Cuban, Teachers and Machines; Larry Cuban, Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Katie Day Good, “Making Do with Media: Teachers, Technology, and Tactics of Media Use in American Classrooms, 1919–1946”, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2016): 75–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2015.1092203.
I have studied the impact of teachers’ agency, school infrastructure, and the materiality of educational technology in depth in other articles. See Nelleke Teughels, “Expectation versus Reality: How Visual Media Use in Belgian Catholic Secondary Schools Was Envisioned, Encouraged and Put into Practice (c. 1900–1940),” Paedagogica Historica (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2020.1856153; Nelleke Teughels, “Teachers’ Agency and the Introduction of New Materialities of Schooling: The Projection Lantern and Classroom Transformations in Antwerp Municipal Schools, c. 1900–1940,” in Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990, ed. Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 143–166.
See, for example, Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera, The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Óscar J. Martín García and Mariano González-Delgado, “Introduction to the Special Issue: History of Education, International Relations and Transnational Perspectives: State of the Art,” Encounters in Theory and History of Education 21 (2020): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.24908/encounters.v21i0.14310.
Michel Espagne and Michaël Werner, “La construction d'une référence culturelle allemande en France” [The construction of a German cultural reference in France], Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 42, no. 4 (1987): 969–992, here 970, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3406/ahess.1987.283428.
Sofie Onghena, “A Blend of Romanism and Germanism: Experimental Science Instruction in Belgian State Secondary Education, 1880–1914,” Science & Education 22, no. 4 (2013): 807–825, here 808, 821, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9512-2; Wouter Van Acker, “Internationalist Utopias of Visual Education: The Graphic and Scenographic Transformation of the Universal Encyclopaedia in the Work of Paul Otlet, Patrick Geddes, and Otto Neurath,” Perspectives on Science 19, no. 1 (2011): 32–80, here 34–35, https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00025.
Onghena, “A Blend of Romanism and Germanism;” Van Acker, “Internationalist Utopias.”
Els Witte, “The Battle for Monasteries, Cemeteries and Schools: Belgium,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 102–128, here 119.
Eckhardt Fuchs, “All the World into the School: World's Fairs and the Emergence of the School Museum in the Nineteenth Century,” in Modelling the Future: Exhibitions and the Materiality of Education, ed. Martin Lawn (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2009), 51–72, here 52.
Dominique Grootaers, “Tensions et ruptures dans le projet éducatif et culturel des humanités (1830-1950)” [Tensions and ruptures in the educational and cultural project of the humanities (1830–1950)], in Histoire de l'enseignement en Belgique [History of teaching in Belgium], ed. Dominique Grootaers (Brussels: CRISP, 1998), 255–302, here 255–266.
Fuchs, “All the World into the School.”
Joseph Devolder, Rapport triennal sur la situation de l'instruction primaire en Belgique: Quinzième période triennale 1885–1886–1887 [Triennial report on the state of primary education in Belgium: fifteenth triennial period 1885–1886–1887] (Brussels: Gobbaerts, 1889), 520.
Alexis Sluys, Mémoires d'un pedagogue [Memoirs of a pedagogue] (Brussels: éditions de la Ligue de l'enseignement, 1939), 55–86; Jeffrey Tyssens, Om de schone ziel van't kind . . . Het onderwijsconflict als een breuklijn in de Belgische politiek [For the beautiful soul of the child . . . The education conflict as a fault line in Belgian politics] (Ghent: Provinciebestuur Oost-Vlaanderen, 1998), 55–79.
Sluys, Mémoires d'un pedagogue, 55–86; Grootaers, “Tensions et ruptures”; Depaepe et al., Order in Progress, 55.
Dominique Grootaers, “Belgische schoolhervormingen in het licht van de ‘Éducation nouvelle’ (1870–1970),” in Reformpedagogiek in België en Nederland [Reform pedagogy in Belgium and the Netherlands], ed. Nelleke Bakker et al. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2001), 9–33, here 14–15.
Braun (1814–1906) was Professor of Pedagogy at, and later Director of, the Normal School of Nivelles. On behalf of the government, he visited and inspected teacher training colleges abroad and participated in exhibitions and conferences. In 1875, he was appointed Inspector of the Normal Schools. He was also the chief editor of the pedagogical journal L'Abeille [The bee]. See Victor Mirguet, “M. Braun, pédagogue” [Mr Braun, pedagogue], L’École nationale 2, no. 3 (1902): 70–71.
Thomas Braun, “Notice sur le musée d’école Belge à l'exposition universelle de Londres de 1862” [Note on the Belgian School Museum at the 1862 London World's Fair], L'Abeille 5 (1862): 209.
Brussels, Archief Belgische Kamer van Volksvertegenwoordigers [Archives of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives], Parlementaire handelingen – Plenaire vergadering [Parliamentary debates – Plenary session] 25 January 1877, 299; Alexis Sluys, Le Cinquantenaire de l’école Modèle 1875–1925 [The fiftieth anniversary of the model school 1875–1925] (Brussels: Service des publications de la Ligue de l'enseignement, 1926), 12.
Brussels, Archief Belgische Kamer van Volksvertegenwoordigers, Parlementaire handelingen – Plenaire vergadering, 25 January 1877, 300.
See note by Sylvia De Coster in Biographie Nationale de Belgique [National biography of Belgium], vol. 43 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1983), cols. 227–236.
Brussels, Archief Belgische Kamer van Volksvertegenwoordigers, Parlementaire handelingen – Plenaire vergadering, 25 January 1877, 301.
Ever since Belgium gained independence in 1830, public education had been managed by different bodies. It had been placed under the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior in 1834; then, in 1837 the administration of state schools was transferred to a bureau that also took charge of the sciences, literature, worship, archives, and health services. After a short spell in the Ministry of Public Works in 1840, public education was again managed by the Minister of the Interior.
“école normale de l’état pour instituteurs primaires à Mons” [State teacher training college for primary teachers in Mons], in Livre d'or: L'art et l'industrie belges à l'Exposition universelle de Paris 1878 [Guestbook: Belgian art and industry at the Paris Universal Exhibition 1878] (Brussels: Lenaerts, 1879); J. J. Campion, “Faits scolaires: Exposition universelle de Paris en 1878. Commission belge” [School facts: Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878. Belgian commission], L'Abeille (1878): 178–182.
See note by Mina Martens, in Biographie Nationale de Belgique, vol. 30 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1958), cols. 231–236.
Thomas Braun, L'Enseignement primaire à l'Exposition internationale de Paris de 1878 [Primary education at the Paris International Exhibition of 1878] (Brussels: Librairie Européenne C. Muquardt, 1880), 318–319.
Ligue belge de l'enseignement [Belgian League of Education], Congrès Internationale, 1880 [International congress], 53; Louis Léger, “Russie,” La revue pédagogique 2 (1878): 88–98, here 90–91, https://education.persee.fr/doc/revpe_2021-4111_1878_num_2_2_1326.
Ligue belge de l'enseignement, Congrès Internationale, 1880, xxxvi–xlii.
Pierre Van Humbeéck, Rapport triennal sur la situation de l'instruction primaire en Belgique: 13e période triennale 1879–1880–1881 (Brussels: Gobbaert 1884), xli; lxxiv–lxxv.
Ibid., xlii, ci–cli.
Ligue belge de l'enseignement, Congrès Internationale, 1880, 53–54.
Van Humbeéck, Rapport triennal 1879–1880–1881, xlii, ci–cli.
Stanislas Meunier, Les projections lumineuses et l'enseignement primaire: conférence faite le 30 mars 1880, dans le grand amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne, aux membres du Congrès pédagogique [Light projections and primary education: Lecture given on 30 March 1880 in the great amphitheater of the Sorbonne, to the members of the Pedagogical Congress] (Paris: Molteni, 1880).
Maurits De Vroede, An Bosmans-Hermans, and Henri Cammaer, Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van het pedagogisch leven in België in de 19de en 20ste eeuw: Deel I: De periodieken 1817–78 [Contributions to the history of pedagogical life in Belgium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: part I: the periodicals 1817–78] (Leuven: KU Leuven, 1973), 36–37, 212.
Teughels, “Expectation versus Reality”; Teughels, “Teachers’ Agency.”
Braun, L'Enseignement primaire, 490.
Sluys (1849–1936) was a teacher at School No. 3 in Brussels in 1866 and at the Normal School from 1869 to 1872, a regent at the Municipal Middle School in Schaerbeek in 1872, a teacher at the Model School from 1875 onward, a member of the general council of the Ligue de l'enseignement in 1879, Director of the Model School from 1879 to 1880, director of the Teachers’ Training School from 1884 to 1909 and president of the Ligue de l'enseignement from 1920 to 1930. See entry by Tobie Jonckheere and Louis Verniers in Biographie Nationale de Belgique, vol. 30 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1958), cols. 765–767.
Congrès Internationale, 1880, 201.
Rapport triennal sur l’état de l'enseignement moyen en Belgique. Années 1885–1886–1887 (Brussels: Fr. Gobbaerts, 1890), lxv, xcv.
Jules de Burlet, Rapport triennal sur la situation de l'instruction primaire en Belgique. Années 1888–1889–1890 [Triennial report on the situation of primary education in Belgium. Years 1888–1889–1890] (Brussels: J. Goemaere, 1892).
Devolder, Rapport triennal 1885–1886–1887, 76–77, 87, 89, 520.
Auguste-Joseph Germain (1834–1905) was a teacher, and from 1868 onward a superintendent of primary education. He was appointed director general of the Ministry of Public Instruction in 1878. He was the author of the 1880 curriculum and later also became the first director of the National School Museum. De Vroede et al., Deel I: De periodieken 1817–78, 162; Marc Depaepe, Mark D'hoker, and Frank Simon, Manuels scolaires belges 1830–1880: Répertoire [Belgian textbooks 1830–1880: directory] (Brussels: Archives générales du Royaume, 2003), 154–155.
Emile Galtier-Boissière, “Une visite aux musées scolaires de Bruxelles et Amsterdam” [A visit to the school museums of Brussels and Amsterdam], La revue pédagogique 28 (1896): 219–223, here 220–221, https://education.persee.fr/doc/revpe_2021-4111_1896_num_28_1_3975.
De Somzée would later represent the Catholic Party. Paul Van Molle, Het Belgisch parlement 1894–1972 [The Belgian Parliament 1894–1972] (Antwerp: Standaard, 1972), 115.
Organe industriel bi-mensuel: Moniteur official du Grand Concours International des Sciences et de l'Industrie [Bimonthly industrial organ: official monitor of the Grand International Competition for Science and Industry] 3 (1887): 29.
De Burlet, Rapport triennal 1888–1889–1890, 446–447.
Wouter Egelmeers and Nelleke Teughels, “‘A Thousand Times More Interesting’: Introducing the Optical Lantern into the Belgian Classroom, 1880–1920,” Journal of the History of Education Society 50, no. 6 (2021): 784–801, https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2021.1918271.
Alfred Picard, Exposition universelle international de 1889 à Paris: rapport général [1889 International World's Fair in Paris: general report] (Paris: Imprimerie national, 1889), 44.
For a detailed account, see Egelmeers and Teughels, “‘A Thousand Times More Interesting.’”
Jules de Trooz, Rapport triennal sur la situation de l'instruction primaire en Belgique. Années 1897–1898–1899 (Brussels: J. Goemaere, 1900), xc–xci.
Ibid., 294–295.
Ibid., 102.
Ministère du commerce, de l'industrie, des postes et des télégraphes [Ministry of Commerce, Industry, Posts and Telegraphs], Rapports du jury international de l'exposition universelle de 1900 à Paris. Groupe I. Éducation et enseignement [Reports of the international jury of the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Group I. Education and teaching] (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1903), 15, 237–239.
Jan Dewilde and Frederik Vandewiere, Véron De Deyne: 1861–1920 (Ieper: Stedelijke Musea, 2012), 7–8.
Congrès international de l'enseignement moyen organisé par la Fédération de l'enseignement moyen officiel de Belgique. Bruxelles 14, 15, 16 Septembre 1901. Rapports préliminaires [International Congress of Secondary Education organized by the Federation of Official Secondary Education of Belgium. Brussels, 14, 15, 16 September 1901. Preliminary reports] (Tournai: Decallonne-Liagre, 1901), 132.
Ibid., 136–137.
Wouter Egelmeers, “Providing Teachers with Slides: Educational Slide Lending Services in Belgium (1895–1940)” (forthcoming).
Jules de Trooz, Rapport triennal sur l’état de l'enseignement moyen en Belgique. Seizième période triennale 1897–1898–1899 (Brussels: J. Goemaere, 1900), 294–295.
Jules de Trooz, Rapport triennal sur l’état de l'enseignement moyen en Belgique. Dix-septième période triennale 1900–1901–1902 (Brussels: J. Goemaere, 1904), xcii–xcvi.
George Kemna, Les projections lumineuses dans l'enseignement [Light projections in education] (Antwerp: Buschmann, 1895), 5–6.
Alexis Sluys, Exposition universelle de Bruxelles: Les compartiments scolaires. L'Allemagne–la Belgique–les Pays-Bas [Brussels Universal Exhibition: The education sections. Germany–Belgium–The Netherlands] (Brussels: Imprimerie du Progrès, 1911), 131–133.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 133.
Ligue belge de l'enseignement, Congrès international de l’éducation populaire, organisé par le Ligue belge de l'enseignement du 30 août au 3 septembre 1910. Compte rendu [International Congress of Popular Education, organized by the Belgian League of Education from 30 August to 3 September 1910. Account] (Brussels: Imprimerie du progrès, 1911), 19–209.
H. Deckx, “De kinema-plaag” [Cinema plague], Het Katholiek Onderwijs [Catholic education] 33 (1911–1912): 542–547, here 545–547; V. R., “Het kinema-gevaar” [The cinema hazard], Het Katholiek Onderwijs 35 (1913–1914): 332–336; “Lichtbeelden in de school” [Light images in the school], Ons Woord [Our word] 20 (1913): 214–215.
David B. Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).