School mural
School murals are large-format pictures to be hung up in the classroom for teaching purposes, which are intended to convey the learning content of various subject areas with impressive and clear representations. The heyday of these murals reached from the last third of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century. At that time, the pictures were part of the standard equipment in schools of various types of school, especially in elementary schools .
After the development of technical processes for picture production and presentation, school wall pictures have largely disappeared from class today.
history
The school mural was preceded by the illustration of school non-fiction books with the intention of making the relevant content clearer. An important starting point was the Orbis sensualium pictus , which was developed in 1658 by the bishop of the Bohemian Brethren and educators, Johann Amos Comenius . The beginning of the actual school mural can be seen in the creation of the so-called Basedow copperplate engravings in 1774. These copperplate engravings are four-part copper plates in book form or individual hand pictures that were used in school lessons. An essential innovation of these copper engravings is the expansion of the visual representation. For the first time, scenes from everyday rural life were shown and the exclusively religious instruction, which was still fundamental in the Orbis sensualium pictus , was dispensed with. This thematic opening is to be seen above all in connection with the ideas of the Enlightenment.
With the invention and spread of lithography around 1800, it became technically possible and economically affordable to produce large, large-scale images for teaching in the required large number of pieces. In the second half of the 19th century, the close interweaving of school book illustrations and wall pictures that had prevailed up to that point increasingly dissolved and school wall pictures gained their own didactic and methodological status alongside school books . At this time the heyday of this medium began. This development was favored by the pedagogical ideas of the Herbartians .
The murals were mostly designed by lesser known artists under the guidance of educators . The mural publishers - such as Wachsmuth in Leipzig or CC Meinhold & Söhne in Dresden - often produced entire series.
The heyday of the school mural was between the years 1880 and 1920, in the time after the "founding years" in the German Empire. Due to the expansion of the class sizes and the change in the school buildings, the format of the pictures had increased again and the range of topics was expanded in terms of content. Associated with the school murals was occasionally the danger of ideologization , without the influence being recognizable at first glance: During the time of National Socialism , Teutons basically represented the ideal of the heroic, victorious fighter. Representations of certain groups of people, for example farmers, "in the sense of character and race studies" appeared increasingly, for example in the form of "portraits or also depictions of traditional costumes". In addition to the murals, which obviously contained National Socialist symbols, there were a number of copies that appeared neutral at first glance. These usually contained comments and handouts for the teacher, which were full of propagandistic aggressiveness, especially during the war years.
Due to the increasing use of technical processes such as the projection of slide , film or foil as well as the use of printed image materials for the pupil's hand, the school mural has lost its central importance in teaching since the second half of the 20th century. Only a few series of murals appeared on the market and photographs replaced the artistically designed murals.
Formats and quality
The murals were not only available in different qualities, but also in different sizes. Each publisher used its own dimensions, which were between 115 × 160 centimeters and 32 × 42 centimeters. Even with the murals made after World War II, the sizes of the murals were not standardized.
The school murals were often used in class, so they had to be particularly durable. At the same time, however, they had to remain affordable for schools. The manufacturers met these two requirements by offering murals in different qualities. In addition to the cheap paper prints, the pictures were also mounted on canvas, paper, leather paper, cardboard and cardboard. The canvas pictures were available with either eyelets or rods. Depending on the material, there were other variants, for example a border could be selected for cardboard. Poor schools in particular got the cheapest murals and prepared them themselves for permanent use. The inexpensive murals were mounted on all imaginable materials, glued with gentle edge strips or even sewn around. They were also nailed to simple wooden strips and given hooks or other hanging devices.
Importance for research
School murals are also sources for educational research as well as school and educational history research. Since school murals as didactic teaching and visual aids formed an important part of the lesson and were used in almost all subjects, the evaluation of this material allows conclusions to be drawn about the content of the lessons at that time, Teaching methods and teaching objectives are drawn. In addition, the historical teaching boards are also evidence of the zeitgeist of the time and reflect the generation and transmission of political attitudes. Since the artist has a central function in the production and conception of the images, this must be taken into account as a decisive factor in the analysis.
See also
literature
- Kurt Dröge: School murals and agriculture. In: Ottenjann (Hrsg.): Landarbeit und Kinderwelt: das Agrarwesen in educational literature, 18th to 20th century. Museumsdorf Cloppenburg, Cloppenburg 1994, pp. 255–282
- Monika Göbel, Wolfgang Ott (Red.): School murals. The development of the image for teaching in the 19th and 20th centuries . Catalog for the exhibition in the Weißenhorn Heimatmuseum, 2012. (= Small series of publications by the Weißenhorn Heimatmuseum; 2). Verlag des Heimat- und Museumsverein, Weißenhorn 2012, ISBN 3-928891-11-1
- U. Koch: Structure and tasks of a wall picture collection . In: Image and Education. Contributions to the foundation of an educational iconology and iconography. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1992, pp. 355-364
- Christian Ritzi, Ulrich Wiegmann: Between Art and Education. On the history of the school mural in Switzerland and Germany. Schneider Hohengehren, 1998, ISBN 978-3-89676-057-9
- R. Stach, W. Müller: School murals as a mirror of the zeitgeist between 1880 and 1980. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1988
Web links
- Historical school murals in Europe
- Robert Emmerich (Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg): School murals from Aschach . Press release, January 30, 2007
- Research center for school murals at the University of Würzburg
- School Museum Bern, Köniz: List of Swiss school murals
Individual evidence
- ↑ See: Kurt Dröge: School murals and agriculture. In: Ottenjann (1994)
- ↑ See: Kurt Dröge: School murals and agriculture. In: Ottenjann (1994)
- ^ Kurt Dröge: School murals and agriculture. In: Ottenjann (1994)
- ^ Ina Katharina Uphoff: The artistic school wall decorations in the field of tension between art and education . Würzburg 2002, page 14f