Chapter 7: Embodied Knowledge and the Nation: School Field Trips

The educational field trip challenges the model of the school as an enclosed space in a number of respects. Particularly noteworthy is the departure from the rectangular classroom that has historically been the chief feature of the modern school. The classroom is, after all, where the real and truly consequential business of schooling occurs. Regardless of current fads and design impulses, corridors, playgrounds, entrances, and even auditoriums are ultimately ancillary to a school’s classrooms. In something of a contrast to the pedagogues of antiquity and the tutors of the renaissance and the early modern period, teachers in the modern school oversee enclosed spaces. Whereas it is not unusual to find the educational figures of these earlier eras visually represented and read about as leading their charges through public spaces and across terrain, the overwhelming majority of nineteenth-and twentieth-century school teachers have discharged their fundamental duties in their classrooms. In large part, modern educators have seen the idea of learning-as-a-journey expressed as no more than a metaphor (albeit as a guiding metaphor in many cases).