Belgium

Sensing Time, Timing Senses

Pieter Verstraete

Time is multisensorial. It can be touched, smelled, seen, heard and tasted. Time, for instance, can be heard when the church bells ring or when in the morning, we are woken up by our digital alarm clock. But time also can be felt as the gentle pressure of a watch around our wrist or the speed of our heart beat as blood passes through our aorta. It can, of course, be smelled or tasted when something is spoiled or overcooked and has begun to grow mould or to burn, respectively. Often in our experiences of time, multiple senses are involved at the same time, such as when we are enjoying musical rhythms and we start tapping along with our hands or feet, but one also can think of instances where someone holding a diary checks when and where their next meeting is.

These multisensorial experiences of time can be found everywhere and at any time. School children, for instance, as well as their teachers, parents, and furthermore, the cleaning staff of a school experience time. The most obvious example is of the school bell: the sound of which symbolises the start and end of the school day. Although the appearance of the school bell has changed dramatically over time, its sound is still used in most schools to split up durations of time within the school into specific periods.

The shaping of school time, however, can not only be found in the representation of the general school schedule – a schedule which is made audible through the sound of a bell. It is also made visible by the displaying of posters around the school, in the contracts signed by the parents, or felt, when a person is physically punished for being late at school. It also can be found in even more meticulous, subtle and intrusive formats like in the infamous beep test, where pupils are expected to run from one white stripe to another before a beep can be heard. The mnemometer is another example of how time has always been implicated in the construction of pupil’s school experiences as well as in the construction of the subjectivities of those pupils.

The mnemometer was one of the many instruments that were used around the early 20th century by the Brothers of Charity in their schools for so-called “feeble-minded children” (“achterlijke kinderen” in Dutch and “enfants arriérés” in French). The Brothers were convinced that some of the intellectual abilities of these “abnormal children” were asleep and needed to be awakened. An important guideline for the Brothers was the Aristotelian belief that there is nothing in the mind that has not at first been processed by the senses. The educational model used by the Brothers thus was called éducation sensorielle – sensorial education – and made use of an enormous number of didactical instruments. The objects and instruments, first of all, had to be used in order to trigger the interest of the child. The collection, secondly, had to create some kind of attentiveness. According to the brothers, that was one of the key issues one had to tackle in special classes: the inattentiveness of the child, especially considering the child’s senses.

The sense of sight, for instance, is an active sense; a sense that actively needs to be directed towards something, just like a hand needs to actively touch something in order to feel. This is precisely what was at stake when one had to deal with “abnormal children” for “un grand nombre d’enfants anormaux ont le regard vague, incertain, morne, plongé dans le vide, ou bien les yeux fixés sur la terre” (p. 14). Transforming the child into an attentive individual was proclaimed by the Brothers as the quintessential task of a special educator. Instruments like the mnemometer were to be used if such an individual wanted to realise this end goal.

The mnemometer was made from a wooden box. The wooden box had a rectangular opening which could be covered by a hatch. The opening was to be used to position small cards with numbers, colours or letters in a particular order. After having placed the cards in the opening and having covered up them up by lowering the hatch, the mnemometer had to be faced towards the pupils at eye-level. By pushing a rubber pear, which was connected to the hatch through a small tube, the hatch could be lifted for some seconds. When the hatch again had been lowered the pupils had to copy what they had seen by making use of a similar series of cards.

The staged picture of the mnemometer, which was included in the Brothers’ book on sensorial education, clearly represents how the use of pieces of card was deemed crucial when considering a new educational ideal, namely the transformation of “abnormal children” into attentive pupils. The aspired subjectivity not only can be sensed from the mnemometer’s functioning, but it also becomes clear as the instrument itself and the visual relation to the operator, remind the spectator of the stately photo devices that were used for making portraits and other official photographs. Although the mnemometer, of course, makes no use of magnesium, the staged picture of the device tellingly leaves the teacher out of the picture and instead focuses on his hands and announces the creation of an ideal image.

Word: Mnemometer.

Number: 784.