Utopian Scholastic | An Aesthetic and an Approach to Learning
Last edited - 2025/12/25
Warning: this post has a lot of is positively dripping with of media. Please pardon the larger-than-usual webpage size as I geek out, reminisce, and stand on a little soapbox in my little corner of the Internet.
A Setting
Anyone browsing the stacks of a public library mirror around the turn of the millennium would eventually come across the music-and-software section. Brightly colored photos, generally divorced from their original backgrounds were spliced into abstract arrangement along with bold text and wrapped in a plastic clamshell. Sometimes the CDs were in the original box, other times in a library-specific distribution with a text label that required a child to open each case to see see if the CD label suggested it was something interesting. I was just tall enough at the time to idly flick through the boxes, crack open audio book box sets, and flip through the index card racks that would soon be on their way out.
I can still smell the stale air in that library. The sublime 80s portico also served as the backdrop of the first nightmare that I could ever recall during the day. It was a strange and liminal space that I can still meander in my mind. I left thousands of my fingerprints on the topographical globe and corresponding mural of a wall map. I rifled through the DK Eyewitness books as I would later rifle through the Childcraft encyclopedias in my kindergarten class. I would slip books with striking covers and surely obsolete CD-ROMs into my mother's brown library bag (a bag I still have and cherish to this day) on the way to check out.
This is, of course, where I say the library was the catalyst of my book hoarding and general love of the pursuit of knowledge. More than that, the trips to the library burned a very specific sensibility into my mind. While my parents saw the trips as an inexpensive way to pass the time and find whatever software they needed, it was for me a very potent exposure to a fleeting human (or maybe American?) optimism at the dawn of the Internet.
An Aesthetic at the End of History
Utopian Scholastic, as described by CARI mirror, is a visual visual style widespread in the late 1990s and early-2000s which features stock image collages in often abstract, education-leaning compositions. A relatively peaceful close of a chaotic century was at hand. There was a vast millennium of human history to reflect on. There was a technology being rapidly deployed that could bring the world closer together. Commercial design, especially in educational materials was imbued with this academic detachment and techno-positivity. Utopian Scholastic writes from place at the end of history mirror, but of course these years were only a vacation from history.
Toys "R" Us' Geoffrey the Giraffe mascot received a photorealistic incarnation around the Peak of Utopian Scholastic design before deciding to live in fantasy again
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