A Micro-Level Shift in Educational ''Regime of Practices'' Under the Habsburg Monarchy: Historical and Psycho-Pedagogical Analysis of Luka Karaman's Work School Bench
A Micro-Level Shift in Educational ''Regime of Practices'' Under the Habsburg Monarchy: Historical and Psycho-Pedagogical Analysis of Luka Karaman's Work School Bench

Summary/Abstract: Eyes, exactly speaking the vision was the most important subject of pedagogical texts in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1878 to 1918. We hold that two factors influenced it. Firstly, they recommended visual education (Zorna obuka) as a right way to educate the character, according to which our acquiring the unquestionable knowledge starts from the all-sided observance of everything around us. Secondly, they held that the vision is one of various factors for creating the loyalty to Habsburg Monarchy, for example, through people’s participation on Emperor Franz Joseph’s visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1910 as its spectators. It is therefore well-known that the visual representation was important to create loyal, pious, national character etc. Nevertheless, the scholarship has not analysed how the vision itself was understood in Bosnia and Herzegovina at that time. In this paper we investigate what kind of image of “observer” was re/produced by means of discourse on vision. As a starting point we analyze a book School bench of Luka Karaman (1910) that firstly discussed the school benches and myopia in the visual way. Besides it, we research the various texts in Bosnian and Croatian pedagogical periodicals and monographs that discuss the vision, especially myopia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early twentieth century, the concept of cost effectiveness became increasingly prevalent in the educational sphere, depending on the progress of mechanization in society. We demonstrate that the correct vision in this context was considered as an economically rational approach to the nerves. Furthermore, psychosomatic activities encompassed the energy circulatory system, involving neural networks and blood flows. Thus, myopia functioned as one moment to normalize the “observer”, that is, human who sees correctly in Bosnia and Herzegovina under the Habsburg regime according to mental and physical rational economy.

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