How Ironic Can an Educational Innovation Be? Brodsky’s Flexible, Foldable School Desk

• In Event: Haptic History: International Studies of Touchable Things (and Other Lacunae) in Educational History

Abstract

Oscar Brodsky arrived in Brussels in 1914 as a member of local school committees in the city of his birth. He suffered from scoliosis. In order to remedy this condition, he developed school desks for which he filed a patent in Brussels in 1915. Several patents that he filed concerned an individual, not even very original, foldable school desk, which also appeared to be suitable for having children study at home or even for all sorts of office work by adult.

In our paper, we investigate how this “marketer” avant la prêt-à-porter -- who quickly succeeded in coming into favor with important pedagogical opinion makers and hygienists –operated and how successful he was. It is precisely this commercial dimension that has remained largely outside the attention of research in the history of education of school desks as the icon of materiality of education. In contrast to other approaches, in this paper we are concerned not so much with the disciplining of the bodies of the pupils or with the mechanistic image of the body but rather with the industrial standardization of the school desk and the creative competition against it from the introduction of individualized (but also standardized) made-to-measure desk for the purposes of New Education.

On the basis of the sporadic data that we have been able to gather on Brodsky’s design, we must conclude, surprisingly, that the “individualized” school desk was not immediately a success. Hardly any of Brodsky’s foldable school desks were ever sold, as far as we know.

The most intriguing and at the same time crucial question that arises here is: Why were Brodsky's desks never popular? What actually was the reason for this failure? Examples of “successful” innovations of analogous didactic material seem to us to be a good starting point, for then we can determine precisely how the Brodsky case precisely differed from these success stories.

Even more ironic, perhaps, is the second part of our thesis: the flexibility envisioned by Brodsky might have been too progressive for the conservative schoolish milieu, but precisely not progressive enough for the modernizing household. The school and office furniture he extolled, which could also serve outside the school for reading and writing was probably seen by the general public as being too schoolish and thus also too remote from real life to have any chance of succeeding. Who would take a foldable school desk on a trip or to his home? The distance between “school” and “life” – which the Belgian reform pedagogues had tried to bridge by means of various designs of the “school for life" ultimately remained too great. In contrast with various other flexible appliances such as foldable music stands, and travel cots and foldable bicycles and even laptops and IPods, the comparable histories of which could well clarify our hypotheses, the Brodsky products did not succeed in integrating themselves in modern life. The cause of this was, in our opinion, the “schoolish” educational context in which they had originated.

Authors

• Marc Depaepe, Catholic Universiteit Leuven

• Frank Fernand Simon, Ghent University