How (un-)useful are images for understanding histories of education? : About teacher centeredness and new education in Dutch primary schools: 1920-1985 = Com són d'(in)útils les imatges per entendre les històries de l'educació? : L'ensenyament centrat en el mestre i l'Escola Nova als centres de primària holandesos: 1920-1985 Authors Sjaak Braster Abstract There is debate about the usefulness of images for telling histories of education. Images can support stories that are told by written documents, but can they be used as primary sources that tell us things that written or oral testimonies cannot? We think they can. We have performed an analysis on a few hundred images of pupils and teachers in classrooms of primary schools for supporting this point of view. We show that by switching between an inductive and a deductive approach, by carefully selecting and coding images, by using multiple correspondence analysis, and by constantly making comparisons between (groups of ) data, we can arrive at conclusions that cannot be drawn on the basis of written documents alone. One of these conclusions is that, in spite of a mechanism known as the grammar of schooling, the image of main stream of Dutch primary schools public/neutral and religious has slowly changed from a teacher centred to a child centred one in the period 1945-1985. New education schools in the Netherlands did not change their child centred image in these years. The image of main stream schooling in the 1980's is comparable with the image of new education in the 1950's. There has been a convergence towards a child centred image of the classroom, with individual tables placed in groups, a teacher that can be found on the same level of the pupils, and a general atmosphere of freedom and happiness. The conclusion that Larry Cuban draws for primary schools in the USA where a teacher centred approach remained dominant in the period 1890-1990, does not apply to the Netherlands. Downloads Text complet (Català) PDF PDF (Español) Published 2010-07-05 Issue No. 15 (2010): gener-juny Section Photography and history of education License The intellectual property of articles belongs to the respective authors. On submitting articles for publication to the journal Educació i Història: Revista d'Història de l'Educació, authors accept the following terms:Authors assign to Society for the History of Education in Catalan-speaking countries (a subsidiary of Institut d’Estudis Catalans) the rights of reproduction, communication to the public and distribution of the articles submitted for publication to Educació i Història: Revista d'Història de l'Educació.Authors answer to Society for the History of Education in Catalan-speaking countries for the authorship and originality of submitted articles.Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for the reproduction of all graphic material included in articles.The Society for the History of Education in Catalan-speaking countries declines all liability for the possible infringement of intellectual property rights by authors.The contents published in the journal, unless otherwise stated in the text or in the graphic material, are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd) 3.0 Spain licence, the complete text of which may be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/deed.en. Consequently, the general public is authorised to reproduce, distribute and communicate the work, provided that its authorship and the body publishing it are acknowledged, and that no commercial use and no derivative works are made of it.The journal is not responsible for the ideas and opinions expressed by the authors of the published articles.