An American Education
Hansi Zhu
University seals are visual abstractions of educational ideology. Throughout the 390-year history of American higher education, universities have drawn from a select set of motifs to construct identities that signal who they aspire to be. The motifs that appear most frequently across the seals reinforce a shared cultural imagination of what education is meant to accomplish.
An American Education is a web-based experience that interprets the American public's perception of education through the values projected by these seals. By deconstructing and reconstructing the seals of the first 100 entries on Forbes' List of America's Top Colleges, it maps the country's educational mythology—treating these static heritage marks as living semiotic systems that subtly shape how Americans understand merit, authority, and the promise of education.