Health, hygiene, and the formation of school subjects

Abstract

ABSTRACT By tracing roughly 200 years of the formation of American school subjects, this paper complicates some of the self-evidence for calls to adapt school subjects according to complex health concerns, more recently amplified by COVID-19. To do so, the paper diagrams a counter-memory of three key amalgams of health related to the makings of school mathematics and reading-as-literacy: balancing mind–body-spirit-matter-nation networks, scientizing a hygiene of instruction for ‘ethnic’ minds, and reconfiguring bio-psycho-social adjustment – all pursued as problems of duration, intensity, and distance from differently dynamic and/or racializing norms. Throughout, we draw attention to how both universalizing and ethno-specific orthodoxies and their proposed alternatives have produced school subjects as self-evident strategic sites for addressing health concerns that invite underappreciated dangers today.