Sight-Seeing in School: Visual Technology, Virtual Experience, and World Citizenship in American Education, 1900-1930

This article argues that the influx of media technologies into schools between 1900 and 1930 was facilitated by an emergent techno-utopian rhetoric in American culture that placed new social value on the acquisition of virtual and worldly experience. Against a backdrop of rising immigration, global visual culture, and American intervention in foreign affairs, the burgeoning educational technology industry-including producers of stereographs, slides, and National Geographic magazine-made inroads into schools by endowing technology with the capacity to "bring the world to the pupil" and serve as a substitute for travel. Aligning with progressive reformers, boosters of early educational technology highlighted these products as tools for teaching ambiguous ideals of citizenship that emphasized the simultaneous cultivation of international understanding and loyal patriotism among youth. This article thus provides a critical historical perspective for present-day discussions about the importance of global citizenship and mediated learning in an age of ubiquitous technology and globalization.