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Dr. Frances Ferguson (University of Chicago, English)

'The Rise of Mass Education: Play into Game'

As educational writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries thought about how to make learning appealing to students, they often resorted to the idea of representing it as play rather than work or to the idea of offering play-time as a reward for work. Experiments in mass education undertaken at the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, however, profoundly reworked the idea of play and converted it into games. Frances Ferguson's talk will take up some of the implications of this shift.

Sponsored by the Department of English and the Graduate School.

A reception will follow. Everyone is welcome!