Science education: History at the edge

Abstract

Teaching children science: Hands-on nature study in North America, 1890-1930 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt; University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2010, pp. xv+363, Price $45.00, ISBN 978-0-22644990-6. Of the many fields that exist in the academic world today, history of science is one that naturally invites a certain amount of cross-disciplinary sharing or interaction. There was a time not more than a few decades past when students were not permitted to even contemplate pursuing the history of physics, for example, without possessing formal training in physics itself. In more recent years, science and technology studies has emerged as a reasonably well-defined scholarly domain where the tools of sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and other disciplines have been brought to bear on historical case studies in an effort to make sense of the production, dissemination, or circulation of natural knowledge in various contexts. The mix of approaches and movement back and forth across disciplinary boundaries has produced scholarship that has both enriched our understanding of past scientific practices and raised new questions regarding some of our most fundamental assumptions about what science is and how it operates in the present. At the same time as we celebrate the interdisciplinarity of such work, we are reminded that writing in the history of science has also been seen from further afield as intellectually narrow, overly specialized, and disconnected from broader historical and social issues. In a commentary written in 2005, Steven Shapin lamented the trend in the profession toward what he called ‘‘hyperprofessionalism,’’ the signs of which include high levels of ‘‘self-referentiality, self-absorption, and a narrowing of intellectual focus.’’ Few readers on the outside, he reasoned, are likely willing or able to do the intellectual work necessary to make sense of the fine historical points often made or to appreciate the connections to their own fields in the highly specialized works which increasingly find their way into print. An excessive inward focus leaves us with a profoundly unhappy situation given the insights history of science could offer scholars in neighboring disciplines (as well as the educated public) about the intersections between science, culture, expertise, and so on. Teaching Children Science directly addresses and attempts to overcome this growing insularity. In this work, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt chronicles the rise of nature study across the United States from the 1890s through the 1930s; her analysis focuses on schools, especially public schools, as key social and cultural spaces where science was systematically disseminated to a mass audience of pupils in the country’s rapidly expanding educational system. The importance of education as a social and intellectual activity has often gone underappreciated (though not neglected entirely) in the history of science. The topic has routinely been treated by professional historians as tangential to the operations of science, the process of education being viewed often as mere dissemination or popularization, activities that have their place and are worth thinking about, certainly, but things that happen nonetheless on the outside or at the border of the science–non-science divide. It has been the hard work of ‘‘real’’ knowledge production that has occupied the attention of most historians of science, who typically touch on education only in connection with the institutions in which scientists typically work. In such instances, consideration of institutional structures or programs has entered their stories only to the extent that they figure in some theoretical breakthrough or in the way they channel various forms of patronage. Other times they serve simply as background to the personal or political activities of notable individuals. In these cases the educational setting more often than not serves as backdrop to the knowledge-making activity itself. A small number of historians, however, have recently made a case for elevating pedagogy as a category of scholarly analysis. There is much to be gained, they argue, by looking deliberately at the ways in which scientific work and educational processes have interacted at different places and points in time. Cyrus Mody and David Kaiser, among this group, have insisted (taking their cue from Kuhn and Foucault, among others) that we need to see teaching and research activities as ‘‘mutually reliant.’’ ‘‘The exigencies of one activity,’’ they insist, ‘‘strongly inform the practice and content