Photograph courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
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Thanks to smartphones and smartboards, you don’t see the 50 states written in white cursive on a green chalkboard anymore. The St. Louis Public Schools saw the writing—or pictures—on the wall early on. In 1901, the district purchased 2,000 lantern slides, noting they gave “greater reality to the lessons of the book by appealing to the eye, to imagination and thought.”
During the World’s Fair, a young teacher, Amelia Meissner, led tours through the Palace of Education, guiding 70,000 kids through “living classrooms,” listening to them gush about X-rays and tiny battleships reenacting the Spanish-American War, oblivious to the fact that they were learning science and history. When the fair closed, SLPS bought up leftover exhibits and had them moved to Wyman School, where mysterious boxes were inventoried. In 1905, the world’s first education museum opened, with Meissner as its lead curator. Every weekday she sent Mr. Magoon, a buggy driver, out to the schools, his wagon laden with microscopes, minerals, and life-size models of plants.
In its first year, the museum doubled its catalog and received donations from the Field Museum and Smithsonian. By 1932, the museum filled two buildings, with a “nature study living room” where kids could hold chunks of mica or watch bees in a hive. When Meissner retired, a decade later, the museum adopted a rather boring name, the Division of Audio-Visual Education, and eventually became a clearinghouse for bleeping science filmstrips—but it was still cutting-edge in 1953, the year these teachers previewed this film—and the year Meissner died. She’d pushed early on for “moving pictures” but saw how they bred passivity. Don’t just default to the films, she said. Let kids touch feathers and fossils, dried wheat stalks and raw cacao beans. Let them listen to jazz and draw flowers. Still life, moving pictures, living bumblebees—to really stretch a kid’s mind and catch her heart, you need it all.
