CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As Great Britain began to industrialize at the end of the 18th century, teaching children to read and write expanded to also include lessons about the material world and how things worked. In her new book, “The Education of Things,” University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences professor Elizabeth Hoiem examines how children’s literature and material culture responded to industrialization and shaped the class politics of playful learning.
Children’s education at the time came to include what she calls “mechanical literacy,” or the knowledge of universal laws that explain physics, global trade and manufacturing. Children were encouraged to explore their surroundings through observation, manipulation, tinkering and scientific experimentation to figure out how things work and to prepare them for advanced lessons in engineering, science, manufacturing and economic markets, Hoiem said.
She said she was particularly interested in the physical aids produced for learning through play. Alphabet blocks incorporated learning letters with learning how to build. Specimen boxes that contained examples of an object in the different stages of a manufacturing process showed how a product is produced – for example, how cotton is picked in the field and then turned into cloth.
Children combined alphabetical and mechanical literacies in different ways, depending on their social class and gender. Those from wealthy families who played at carpentry or blacksmithing engaged in the same tasks that working children did for wages or while learning a trade, Hoiem said.
As the economy became less dominated by agriculture, wealthy families taught their children a broad knowledge of manufacturing processes and a theoretical understanding of global trade. This kind of education was designed to prepare their children to manage workers, invent processes or take a government position. Women learned these subjects to make informed purchases as tasteful consumers. It also taught children about their place in relation to material goods, she said.
“Like alphabetical literacy, mechanical literacy was conceptualized in ways that maintained class distinctions … with a particular kind of mastery over objects reserved for people of property,” Hoiem wrote in the book’s introduction.
Many of the books on science and manufacturing show children as characters who tour factories, shipyards and mines, where they observe workers, she said. For example, a child in the book might watch a worker use a lever and compare that tool to his toy to learn the laws of physics behind simple machines.
“The lessons may seem like apolitical information, but these stories position readers to identify with the wealthier characters who oversee labor and have the power to explain it scientifically. It’s not just about learning physics, but also about whose children have leisure to know the laws of physics. Privileged children who do not have to work can develop an intellectual understanding of physical labor through playful experimentation. Meanwhile, the working-class characters are sources of information or moral lessons; they are not portrayed explaining natural laws or manufacturing philosophy. Through these books and toys, children internalized a class divide between physical and intellectual work,” Hoiem said.
Significantly, the process of observation modeled for children in these materials is what enabled the advent of mechanized labor, she said.
“When people replaced skilled labor with machines, they relied on observations of closely guarded trade skills to design alternative processes that rely on less skilled workers operating machines,” Hoiem said.
Workers who had skills that couldn’t be replaced could demand higher pay, so capitalists deskilled the labor by “devising new industrial processes that divided labor up into smaller parts that were easily taught to interchangeable workers,” Hoiem said. “The process of industrial capitalization required a certain way of looking at work, understanding it and then changing it. That understanding distinguished the capitalist from the worker.”
Working-class authors who were involved in proto-socialist movements pushed back through radical journalism and grassroots political organizing, Hoiem said. They offered an alternative vision of mechanical literacy that recognized everyday knowledge of working life and experiences of poverty that were relevant to governance and trade policies, and they advocated for education to be widely accessible. The schools available to working-class children often limited instruction to reading, with very little writing and no science or higher-level subjects, Hoiem said, and children could only attend for two to three years. Radical authors who supported regulating child labor and expanding suffrage devised learning materials that combined reading and writing with observation to prepare their children for political participation.
The children’s books created by working-class authors that Hoiem explores are primarily grammar books meant to teach working-class people how to express themselves in writing so they could influence government policies and be involved in political life, she said.
In addition to class struggles over knowledge, late 18th century children’s literature produced charming stories that Hoiem described as fun and loveable.
“You see for the first time when children became obsessed with trains or pretended to check out groceries. You see the origins of activities that we take for granted today – that kids love to play with trains or build things with science kits,” she said.