I was pleased to learn this morning that Routledge has agreed to publish Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing! This is great news for a project that I’ve been working on (off and on) for a couple of years.
This project is important because it introduces (in an compelling way, I believe) some important ideas about education and media, and about education itself.
As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the book presents media –in this case, pictures, texts, books– as constitutive of modern education (i.e. schooling from the Renaissance to the present day). The book shows how the educational value of these new media are epitomized in early readers like Comenius’ Orbis Pictus. It combines text and illustrations in combinations that were earlier unknown and technically impossible (at least on a mass scale)
Also, as I describe in one part of the translator’s introduction, these points about media and education underscore the historical and cultural specificity of education as a set of inter-generational practices.