NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

The Child and the School
Review of the Danish School Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark

Heloísa Pimenta Rocha, University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

A visit to the Danish School Museum (Dansk Skolemuseum) represents a privileged opportunity to reflect about the constitution of specificity of the childhood, in its relationships wit hthe configuration of the school as a proper place for children’s education.  Established in 1995, by an initiative of the Danish Ministry of Education, the Danish Union of Teachers, and a mutual insurance company for teachers, the Danish School Museum was conceived as the national museum in the history of education.

The museum contains a significant collection composed of over a hundred thousand objects, including furniture, school materials, uniforms, schoolwork, schoolbooks, models of buildings, photos, 12,000 wall-charts produced in different countries of Europe, and many other items.  The contact with the material that was acquired and organized by the Danish educators allows an approximation of times, spaces, and daily practices lived by generations of boys and girls.  The collection enables a questioning upon the constitution and disclosure of the school structure regarding childhood socialization and at the same time, it allows us to question the means through which the figure of the student was produced within the school.

The school of the past, in its materiality and in its daily practices, receives a special attention in the permanent and temporary exhibition set up in different areas of the museum.  Throughout the museum halls, the visitor will find schoolrooms, in miniature, that attempt to reproduce the old school environment beside distinctive practices of transmission and acquisition of knowledge and abilities involving groups of children organized according to age, level of advancement, and gender.

Images courtesy of Pedro N. Pinto Neto

Moreover, it is also possible to visit a classroom set up according to demands of modern teaching methods that were internationally divulged during the last decades of the 19^th century and the beginning o the 20^th, where one can find multiple objects that were used as a support to the daily work of a teacher, such as maps, globes, musical instruments, collections of stones, rocks, and insects, stuffed animals, measurement instruments, fountain-pens, and ink.

The visitor can also admire the exhibition of wood toys and objects produced in the woodwork classes that were attended by boys, only.  These objects are exhibited together with equipment employed for their crafting and with instructions about body posture to be adopted in the practices of woodwork, as well as photographs.  Besides the woodwork, an important place within the collection of the museum is held by objects and images that regard the labor world in town as well as in the field, which offer important evidence about the manner that social schooling happened and, at the same time, about the objectives that conducted the socialization of children within the schooling scope.

It is also worthwhile to note the wall-charts featuring a wide range of themes, from body parts, aspects of animal and vegetable life, to the problems that were generated by urbanization, for example, accidents caused by car traffic.  Highly notable is the succession of twelve posters made in France, which set an exemplar narrative of the disastrous consequences of alcoholism.

More than the contact with a collection of objects that refer to the material culture of school, a visit to the Danish School Museum makes one think about the practices through which the school has participated in the process of socialization of children.  However, at the same time, it makes on question the manner by which the people have appropriated the space-time of schooling.  It is not casual then, in this sense, the presence of objects that refer to punishment attributed to those who did not submit to the imposed patterns, as well as objects that refer to games and children’s play.

On your next visit to Copenhagen, don’t miss the Danish School Museum.

Author’s Notes:

Special thanks to Prof. Jorgen Duus, a retired professor of Biology and Language, for meeting with us with a kind reception and for introducing us to the collection of the Danish School Museum.

The museum is located at Rådhusstraede 6, 1466 Kbh K.  It is open Monday to Friday from 10:00AM to 4:00PM, and on Sundays and public holidays from 12:00 noon to 4:00 PM.  For additional information, visit the website:  http://www.skolemuseum.dk

My visit to the museum was sponsored by the CAPES, an organization that is subordinated to the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and by the University of Campinas, Brazil.