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An Officer and a Scholar: Nineteenth-Century West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Christopher J. Phillips
Christopher J. Phillips*
Affiliation:
NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and has been appointed assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of History
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Extract

Over two centuries after the invention of blackboards, they still feature prominently in many American classrooms. The blackboard has outlasted most other educational innovations and technologies, and has always been more than an aide memoire. Students and teachers have long assumed inscriptions on its surface made mental processes visible. As early as 1880, in fact, the A.H. Andrews & Co. catalog described the blackboard as a “mirror reflecting the workings, character, and quality of the individual mind.” The blackboard's ultimate origins are unclear but in North America one institution, the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, played a particularly important role in establishing the device within classrooms. The blackboard's use at West Point in the first years of the nineteenth century garnered the novel tool notice and by the Civil War, the blackboard's place had been so firmly established in American schools as to be easily overlooked in importance; it was simply part of the physical and intellectual architecture of the classroom, Subsequent changes in construction and production have affected cost and appearance, but the basic idea of a vertical surface on which erasable inscriptions are made has remained.

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 82 - 108
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Copyright © 2015 History of Education Society 

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References

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61 General Regulations for the Army, 336–37; Board of Visitors Report, 1821, 31.Google Scholar

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64 The literature on student unrest is surveyed in Geiger, Roger L., “Introduction,” in The American College in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Geiger, Roger L. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 1–36 esp. 10–11 and in Hessinger, Rodney, “‘The Most Powerful Instrument of College Discipline’: Student Disorder and the Growth of Meritocracy in the Colleges of the Early Republic,” History of Education Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 237–62; For the political significance of contemporary unrest at Dartmouth, see Fiegan Green, Jane, “‘An Opinion of Our Own’: Education, Politics, and the Struggle for Adulthood at Dartmouth College, 1814–1819,” History of Education Quarterly 52, no. 2 (May 2012): 173–95. For parental views of West Point, see, for example, Letter to John Latrobe from his father quoted in Semmes, John H.B. Latrobe and His Times, 67–69. In fact, there is some evidence that West Point's method did not “work” reliably, in that final rankings of cadets did not correlate strongly with distinction in career as officers. Not finishing in the top of one's class, though, did make it unlikely that a student would become an engineer or scientist. See Molloy, “Technical Education and the Young Republic,” 440.Google Scholar

65 Arney, , West Point's Scientific 200; Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country, 117–24. For developments elsewhere, see Warwick, Masters of Theory; Gillispie, Science and Polity in France, 536–37; Molloy, , “Technical Education and the Young Republic,” 57–58, 113, 117; Calinger, Ronald, “The Mathematics Seminar at the University of Berlin: Origins, Founding, and the Kummer-Weierstrass Years,” in Vita Mathematica: Historical Research and Integration with Teaching, ed. Calinger, Ronald (Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1996), 153–76; Parshall, and Rowe, , The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community. Google Scholar

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68 Some disagreement exists on the causes of these changes, but there is no doubt that there was a significant shift in the emphasis of education at the Ecole Polytechnique: Charles Gillespie, “Un Enseignement Hégémonique: Les Mathématiques,” in La Formation Polytechnicienne, 31–43; Belhoste, “Un Modèle à l’Épreuve.”Google Scholar

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74 Kidwell, , “An Erasable Surface”; a couple of early references are mentioned in Fletcher B. Dresslar, “Blackboards,” 390–94 in vol. 1 of Monroe, Paul, ed., A Cyclopedia of Education (New York: Macmillan Company, 1911), on 391; Treatises from the 1840s include Bumstead, Josiah F., The Blackboard in the Primary School (Boston, MA: Perkins & Marvin, 1841); Goldsbury, John, Exercises and Illustrations on the Blackboard; Furnishing an Easy and Expeditious Method of Giving Instruction (Keene, NH: George Tilden, 1847); and Alcott, William A., Slate and Blackboard Exercises (New York: Mark H. Newman, 1843).Google Scholar

75 Kiddle, Henry and Schem, A.J., Dictionary of Education and Instruction (New York: E. Steiger & Co., 1881), 41.Google Scholar

76 See Latour, Bruno, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, eds. Bijker, Wiebe E. and Law, John (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 225–58 and Winner, Langdon, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, ed. Winner, Langdon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19–39. This case study also provides historical grounding to some of the philosophical debates surrounding so-called “extended cognition,” for example, Menary, Richard, ed., The Extended Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).Google Scholar