Sarah Anne Carter on Learning About Objects Through Object Lessons

Making of a Historian

Our website, historian.live, has links, book lists, and more! So if you’re like me, you’ve used the phrase ‘object lesson’ to mean some kind of telling real-world example of something. The new parent waking up at 4:30 in the morning to get work done, for example, is an object lesson about the current childcare crisis. But the phrase used to mean something concrete itself: a particular kind of educational practice that put at its center a student's concrete and systematized appreciation of a physical object. A teacher would present an object—be it something everyday, like a window or a ladder, or something special like ginger, or a little classroom museum of interesting things—and then lead the students through a number of practices that allowed them to appreciate the object, first as an object, and then later, as a representative of abstract ideas. This shows a really distinctive way that 19th century Americans thought about objects, and thought WITH objects. When they saw, say, a piece of coal, they had been taught not only to appreciate the coal as an object, and describe it, but to understand it as a process of production, trade, and the economy.