Historical relations between science and children

As scientists established some of the first academies of science in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century, early Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke were arguing that children represented the ideal tabula rasa for learning. If advancing science hinged on the very possibility of learning, then the blank state of children's minds was one of the fundamental human conditions underlying science. Children in a sense were everything that science strove not to be, i.e. blank. Yet at the same time, Locke's philosophical construction of children as blank slates in regard to content and thus ready for the gradual development of rationality lent support to his empiricist epistemology for scientific knowledge. In fact, his speculations on children's capacities for moral and rational thinking appear at the very beginning of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding from 1689. Locke then proceeds to develop his ideas about the advancement of the sciences through organized experience. Like the sciences, children would gradually become moral and rational beings through focused education by their parents. Although Locke's ideas about education and epistemology were opposed to those put forward by other notable philosophers such as René Descartes who thought that rational capacities were indeed innate and that the sciences advanced through reasoned argument, Locke and Descartes fundamentally agreed that whatever characterized science had somehow to reflect whatever characterized children.

John Locke in the late 1690s worked as a tutor for the twelve-year-old son of Sir Francis and Lady Masham and tried his hand at communicating new scientific ideas to him. Locke produced a ten-thousand-word outline on his empiricist natural philosophy, never intended for publication, merely as a supplement to his lectures, but from the 1750s onwards, the manuscript saw publication as a separate pamphlet. It also served as direct inspiration for one of the earliest science books for children, Tom Telescope's Newtonian System of Philosophy, adapted to the capacities of young gentlemen and ladies … published in 1761 by (and usually attributed to) John Newbery.Footnote ⁹ Newbury, unlike Locke, strove to make science playful by means of objects or toys already familiar to children. The book advertisement emphasized playfulness, describing it as a ‘Philosophy of Tops and Balls’.

The book itself also portrayed science as being fully compatible with the teachings of the Bible and in accordance with the perceived moral virtues of the aristocracy. Science, in other words, embodied close ties between rational, religious and social realms, and children's pursuit of science would only help to enforce such ties. Science was constitutive of the established order. With the market for children's literature burgeoning by the end of the eighteenth century, other authors adopted the ‘instructive and amusing’ genre.Footnote ¹⁰ Tom Telescope's Newtonian System went through several editions, all of which were heavily modified to reflect dramatic developments in science and society. Thus, by the final edition of 1838, an exposition of more specialized scientific branches such as geology and magnetism had been included, and the original aristocratic setting replaced with a bourgeois middle-class one.Footnote ¹¹

By the mid-nineteenth century, as societies and journals for scientific specialisms and for public outreach appeared, science for children in Great Britain and elsewhere took on increasingly diverse forms. New practical lessons aimed at stimulating children's own engagement with their natural environment now supplemented books for schoolroom instruction in the sciences. Authors employed different literary forms such as dialogues, fables, object-centred conversations and even fairy tales to encourage children to see and understand their surrounding world through the lenses of the sciences.Footnote ¹² Vendors marketed new objects such as games and children's instruments to meet a demand for science-based leisure time in the domestic sphere. All of these developments shared with their eighteenth-century precedents the double ambition to present children with some modified version of scientific knowledge and to instil in them whatever the producers perceived to be proper social, moral, imaginary and rational competencies. Politeness and discipline, but also wonder at the marvels of nature and reasoned argument, were proper virtues for children. Exposure to science provided one of the means to obtain such parenting and educational goals. Resourceful parents and teachers valued science along with literature, music, sport and other activities as one of the foundations of good manners and culture. Science for children and young people thus reflected prevalent ideas about children and child rearing as much as ideas about science.Footnote ¹³

With the spreading of democratic ideals and the emergence of mass culture, science for children and young people diversified even more while generally maintaining its instructional and educational bent. Greater attention to the child in scientific, educational and social spheres, as witnessed by, for example, child psychiatry, compulsory schooling and children's rights, also affected the ways in which authors and producers presented science to and deemed science appropriate for children. In the early twentieth-century United States, educational reformers affiliated with the nature study movement proposed curriculum reforms based on direct, hands-on experience with natural objects and field trips.Footnote ¹⁴ The reformers believed that children's immediate experiences with nature should form the basis of all science teaching. They criticized existing science curricula for placing too much emphasis on logical deduction from fundamental theories and for trying to convey too many basic facts. Referring to progressive educational theory propounded by John Dewey, Francisco Ferrer, Maria Montessori and many others, they argued that children had an innate capacity for discovery and curiosity, but not logical thinking and rote learning. It followed that science teachers should provide children in elementary schools with sensory inputs stimulating their admiration for and amazement at nature and natural events, but also inspiring them to ask questions about what they saw and answer these questions in systematic ways. The exposure to nature in the wild, so to speak, would have the added benefit of allowing children who increasingly grew up in industrialized, urban environments to feel connected with nature.

The reformers of the nature study movement collaborated with museum curators to allow children to use the collections of natural-history museums in their investigations of natural specimens. In fact, many museums in the early decades of the twentieth century began to cater for larger numbers of children, and children seemed to flock to the museums – natural-history museums and museums of science and technology in particular. The Science Museum in London opened its Children's Gallery in 1931 partly in response to the increasing number of children who were visiting the museum's existing galleries intended for an adult audience and often were considered a nuisance by other visitors and museum staff. The main attraction of the gallery, at least from the point of view of its main curator, F.St.A. Hartley, was a number of historical-didactic dioramas presenting different modes of transport throughout the ages. Hartley argued that the dioramas would enable children ‘to make comparisons between different methods of transport and to obtain a grasp of the general evolution of transport and its influence on the process of civilisation’.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus the dioramas would serve the overall intention of the gallery, namely to show children what things such as means of transport meant in the daily lives of people. Placed in historical order, the dioramas presupposed, and tried to build, the discipline required in children to view the dioramas as planned and to absorb more or less implicit messages contained in them. In addition, the gallery adopted the hands-on approach that also inspired the nature study movement in the United States in a pulley block exhibition demonstrating the relative effectiveness of lifting the same weight by different arrangements of rope and pulley. Audience studies performed in the 1950s indicated that children, at least unaccompanied children, ‘tended to flit from one thing to another, stopping to press buttons or turn handles and treating the Gallery more as an amusement arcade than as a source of scientific information’.Footnote ¹⁶

Around mid-twentieth century, many different views on the relationship between science and children were available to those who wanted to produce and consume science content for children. Symmetrically, the way in which one understood children would affect the ways in which one understood science, and vice versa, and how best to connect those two categories. Some continued to see children as more or less blank slates in need of filling or as capable beings with innate capacities for learning in specific ways. Those who saw science as a collection of ready-made facts tended to opt for more didactic exposition, whereas those who believed that science was a way of thinking about the world or even as a way of being in the world would emphasize things like inquiry and problem-solving. Some were mostly concerned about the impact of science on society, whereas others wanted to present science as a rational and/or empirical mode of observing and explaining. Science for children, then, had become a heterogeneous field with entangled ideas about science, children and society.

After the Second World War, many industrialized countries began allocating public funds to scientific research and technological innovation. Investments in science and technology were essential for security and socio-economic growth. Because of the additional public money flowing into universities and research institutions and the increased significance attached to science and technology, many people addressed the lack of trained scientists and engineers. Where does one start looking for one's future scientists and engineers? Children, of course. In the United States and in other countries around the world, scientists, educationalists, corporate managers, politicians and others were looking for ways in which to attract children from an early age to science and engineering. The aim of making science appeal more to children resulted in initiatives such as talent searches, science clubs, science fairs, science centres, home labs, curriculum reforms and much more.Footnote ¹⁷

Such initiatives are hard to characterize in a few words, yet observers have pointed out that one of the results has been an unintended alignment between science and children.Footnote ¹⁸ Science is seen as ‘childish’ in the sense that it can be done by children, and children are understood as ‘proto-scientific’ because they by nature are curious and explorative. In other words, science defines children, as they are often, but not always, expected to behave like ‘little scientists’ and at an early age to prepare for scientific or engineering careers.Footnote ¹⁹ Likewise, children define science as science often, but certainly not always, is believed to involve curiosity-driven exploration of the natural world.

The co-production of categories like science and children, we note, involves society in many ways. Since the Enlightenment, science for children and young people has served as more than a means to rational thinking and individual emancipation. Science allowed children to see order and meaning in nature and society, and adults always saw science as a supplement to religious or liberal upbringing that would improve children's compliance and sense of duty. Science provided discipline and a work ethic. Learning about scientific developments, parents and instructors could help children take in the idea that they live within a grander scheme of things, a logical plan. For that reason, when they grow up, they comply more easily to a master plan. By way of this, there is an intimate relationship between science education and citizenship.

What we hope to have achieved by now is to have provided the reader with a few, but certainly not all, of the important themes of the historiography of science for children and young people. We have indicated that many important studies are out there already, but we have mentioned only a few. We have concluded that a philosophically nuanced and historically sensitive approach to the topic is the best way to go forward. Existing studies of science for children have tended to focus on larger countries such as the United States, Great Britain and France. We specifically would like to encourage historians of science with a special interest in how science has been presented to children and how this has affected the ways in which we think about both science and children to broaden their geographical and temporal scales. Our collection of papers results from two sessions organized by one of the authors (Zilhão) at the 6th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science held in Lisbon, 4–6 September 2014. In what follows, we will provide a brief overview of the papers by looking at their geographical, temporal and topical diversity.

Science for children and young people in different regions and periods

We are painfully aware that the previous sections on historical relations between science and children and young people have a narrow outlook. One of the things that we like best about the articles collected in this BJHS Themes issue is that they describe people, events and topics that so far have received scant historical attention and thus are less well understood. Attempts at mobilizing science for educational and national purposes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Portugal nicely illustrate this. Gomes details how educational reformers sought to incorporate science teaching into Portuguese secondary schools from 1836 to 1933 to develop the rational and critical competencies required for pupils to become autonomous citizens and to support their individual process of personal formation.Footnote ²⁰ Zilhão finds that Prego's popular novels published in the early twentieth century also aimed to build children's moral and rational capacities. Educational reforms and Prego's novels about rural life shared the notion that scientific knowledge would be constitutive to building Portugal's future.Footnote ²¹

In Gomes's case, the establishment of the First Portuguese Republic in 1910, despite political turmoil, gave rise to new hopes concerning curriculum reforms that would apply progressivist ideas about inquiry-based education and thus place more emphasis on pupils’ own experimentation in school laboratories. Still, except for the introduction of new teaching aids such as microscopes and dissecting tools, traditional teaching methods based on classification and on what Gomes calls the historical–naturalistic approach remained pervasive. She cites institutional inertia, financial problems and political instability as the reasons why reforms were not implemented. Consequently, many pupils in Portuguese secondary schools were exposed to a curriculum centred on traditional biological classification methods where the handling of collection specimens was common. This, in turn, could be one of the reasons why Portugal today has what Gomes refers to as ‘an outstanding scientific heritage, fortunately preserved by museums’.Footnote ²²

Zilhão, in a similar vein, notes that Prego, despite the liberal and reformist ideas propounded by his novels, remained conservative at heart. The protagonists of Prego's stories all came to value new knowledge as a means of progress in agriculture. The explicit message was that agricultural science and technology would have a positive impact on farming in Portugal. Implementing new knowledge and new techniques required new rural identities. Farmers and farm workers had to adapt to continual vocational training, and children and young people had to be able to demonstrate initiative and problem-solving capacities. This would have the added effect of making the public image of living in the countryside more consistent with modern values such as progress and liberal economy. Yet, at the same time, Prego tried to balance his liberal, progressive messages with advocacy of the status quo when it came to redistribution of wealth and power in Portuguese society. As in Gomes's case, actual reform turned out to be difficult. Presenting scientific and technical issues to children and young people in novel ways could have been the compromise that Portuguese educational reformers and science popularizers chose in order to balance new ideas with the existing order.Footnote ²³

As scientific knowledge and educational ideas circulate from one context to another they become amendable to change and translation. They simply mean different things to different people. Yet some forms of knowledge and some ideas have remained remarkably stable as they have moved across geographical and temporal boundaries. They seem to aspire to a kind of universality, which in part could be due to the ways in which, and the extent to which, they circulated. Progressive education is a case in point. Many articles in our collection deal with the remarkable circulation of some of the basic ideas of progressive education, most notably the emphasis on inquiry-based, experiential learning. The Book of Knowledge studied by Oliveira, for example, claimed to teach testing, and not handed-down knowledge, as the true authority in science. In reality, however, the book always referred to scientists and scientific institutions as the proper sources of authoritative knowledge. The book appeared in many languages and thus helped to spread the idea of progressive education around the world, even though the book itself did not really practise what it taught.Footnote ²⁴ The same goes for the idea of ‘integrated science teaching’ in Nielsen's paper, which shared many features with progressive education. Although UNESCO's programme in integrated science teaching made possible wide distribution of the basic ideas and practices propounded by UNESCO, the programme also allowed for a high degree of flexibility regarding the very meaning of integrated science teaching. It seems as if interpretive flexibility makes the wide circulation of ideas easier.Footnote ²⁵

Ways of communicating science to children and young people

Science, James Secord argued in his widely cited keynote address delivered at the fifth joint Three Societies Meeting in Halifax in 2004, is a form of communicative action.Footnote ²⁶ This is obviously true since science involves communication all the way through from observation to deliberation to publication. It could even be true in a more fundamental sense if one were to adopt an approach to communication in which communication does not mean transmission but rather is a self-referential process that constitutes meaning within the framework of a system.Footnote ²⁷ This would mean that science itself, as a system for making meaning in specific ways, becomes science through communication, and not the other way around, where communication is an event that takes place after the real science is completed. In this view, science is the totality of all communication that attributes meaning to the notion of science. Regardless of such systems-theoretical speculations, the historiographical advantages of looking at science as a form of communicative action, Secord notes, is that it allows us to resolve the apparent paradox between science's socio-historical situatedness and its global pervasiveness by looking at knowledge that travels from a few local settings to many others. Secord recommends that we attend to processes and practices of circulation of knowledge in addition to (maybe rather than) production and consumption of knowledge, and that we try to understand why some patterns of circulation are more durable than others and why some forms of knowledge travel ‘lighter’ than others.

Although the articles in this BJHS Themes issue do not claim to adhere systematically to Secord's recommendations, we do find that most authors exhibit the kind of historical sensitivity to processes and formats of communication, which is the core of the ‘Secordian’ historiography. Richard Somerset, for example, looks at the rise of a chronological narrative in nineteenth-century natural history. The genre of ‘popular history of life’, as he calls it, used palaeontological and stratigraphic evidence to offer a comprehensive story about major epochs in the chronology of the Earth and of life on Earth. Somerset argues that the popular genre, to become broadly popular, had to meet certain pedagogical or rhetorical demands such as a coherent plot, key actors and major events. As much as the geological record, the requirements of the popular genre helped preconfigure the scientific narrative. Telling the story of life to children and young people was a good place to experiment with emergent naturalistic themes and narratives.Footnote ²⁸

In a similar vein, Peter Bowler's article about the Meccano Magazine in the twentieth century deals with the entanglement between scientific genres for adults and children and young people respectively. Although Meccano Magazine was a magazine for boys, used to promote the Meccano toys, it also devoted editorial space to stories about science and technology (mostly technology). Its editor Ellison Hawks from 1922 to 1935 obviously liked to write about new scientific and technological developments (he also authored a few popular boys’ books). As a result, Meccano Magazine in many ways resembled a regular popular-science magazine and probably many adults (mostly fathers?) read it. Its juvenile popular science stories for a while covered the entire market for popular science magazines. Interestingly, Bowler notes, fathers probably also read the Meccano Magazine, which made it a competitor of its adult counterparts.Footnote ²⁹ Bowler's observation is noteworthy not least because opportunistic reading of the writings for young people by less sophisticated adults usually passes unnoticed. The set of books on agriculture discussed by Zilhão is another case in point.Footnote ³⁰

Cultural appropriation, citizenship and gender

While most leisurely reading material appealed to, and sought to develop, children's faculties of imagination and reason, it also aimed to mould children's ideas about the world and their own future role as rational citizens. Indeed, all authors touch on science for citizenship and social responsibility. Chando Roy, for example, discusses the importance attached to scientific education in late nineteenth-century colonial Bengali society for overcoming both colonial discrimination and traditional injustice. He argues that although British rule over India was highly criticized, the local avant-garde nonetheless recognized that scientific knowledge would bring prosperity to India and prove invaluable in overthrowing firmly rooted prejudices, such as child marriage, folk knowledge and Indian mythology. In magazines about science intended for juvenile audiences, they tried to combine Western knowledge about the natural world, especially about plants and animals, with Indian views about the compassionate relation between humankind and nature. Mostly, however, they ended up replacing traditional Indian world views with the kind of scientific curiosity and rationality they thought would be more appropriate for the new Bengali middle class. In the end, however, the protagonists of Chando Roy's story failed to meet their aims because of insurmountable structural differences within Bengali society. Science for children and young people, in fact, deepened rather than diminished the gap between the educated Bengali middle class and the ‘others’ that it sought to enlighten.Footnote ³¹

Contrast the Bengali juvenile magazines with the Meccano Magazine studied by Bowler and The Children's Encyclopedia in Oliveira's paper, both of which place science as the sole source of natural knowledge and portray nature in utilitarian terms, and then it becomes easy to compare science for children and young people across cultural settings.Footnote ³² Even though the connection between science and the British colonies also featured in the Meccano Magazine, the perspective obviously was a different one. Bowler notes that Ellison Hawks, the editor of Meccano Magazine from the early 1920s to 1935, portrayed science and technology as means of expanding the British Empire. Whereas the Bengali avant-garde in Roy's paper had to strike a compromise between science as representative of the modern world and traditional Indian values, Hawks undauntedly promoted the relevance of science for national prosperity and extended colonization. In a similar vein, Oliveira finds that the representation of science remained virtually unchanged through numerous translations of The Children's Encyclopedia, yet the meanings that readers would attach to the articles would change. Oliveira's paper provides insights into the remarkable stability of science for children and young people, all the while noting that same words would have different connotations in different milieus.

The book collection on agriculture written by João Coelho da Mota Prego, discussed in the paper by Zilhão, was a tool for improving Portuguese young people's future.Footnote ³³ Zilhão discusses how science and technology as featured in Prego's books on agriculture served the purpose of re-educating the Portuguese rural inhabitant and reviving the country's agriculture-based economy. Zilhão particularly stresses that the book's representation of scientific and technological knowledge responded to social and economic problems in Portugal at the time, such as literacy or rural development. Interestingly, there are historical parallels between Zilhão's story and Nielsen's paper on the UNESCO Programme in Integrated Science Education that took off in 1969. UNESCO's programme, aimed at integrating science into primary-school curricula all around the world, specifically sought to improve literacy and development in less developed countries.Footnote ³⁴ The basic assumptions underlying the UNESCO programme were in many ways similar to Prego's liberal ideas.

Before we conclude our thematic exposition of the rich material included in this issue, we should note that gender is an implicit theme in some papers. Some authors, such as Bowler, observe traditional gender roles with the Meccano Magazine described as ‘the best and brightest paper for boys’, whereas others, such as Chando Roy and Zilhão, place more emphasis on female agency. The juvenile magazines for Bengali children in Chando Roy's paper targeted both boys and girls. In this respect, they challenged traditional views according to which girls were supposed to marry very early and expect nothing from their adulthood but becoming good wives. The magazines in a certain sense created an intellectual and emotional space shared by both genders, before marriage would prohibit free mixing of men and women. Girls were encouraged to write to the magazines to express their own opinions on topics, and the magazines featured several women authors. All the same, the attitude towards the female gender remained one of stigmatization: the magazines mostly portrayed girls as passive, respectful and obedient, and not given to enterprise.Footnote ³⁵ Unsurprisingly, given the magazine's explicit emphasis on boys, this is more or less the same gender bias that we can observe in the Meccano Magazine discussed by Bowler.Footnote ³⁶ Zilhão, however, finds that girls in Prego's turn-of-the-century stories about life in the Portuguese countryside had entrepreneurial qualities. Moreover, they were educated and often the protagonists and in Prego's novels were able to use science and technology to overthrow deeply rooted superstitions.Footnote ³⁷

Science and children

Science for children and young people in this issue is Janus-faced.Footnote ³⁸ On the one hand, obviously, the papers’ historical narratives about authors, translators, educators, reformers and, unfortunately less so, children and youth all revolve around aspects of science. Science for children and young people belongs to popular science. As popular science, it deserves historical treatment as a cultural manifestation of science that tells us about prevalent ideas about science, society and their relationship. It is a special kind of popular science because it aims at connecting the citizens of tomorrow with science. Science for children and young people, in this respect, serves to build humans and literally shape the future by moulding the people that will inhabit it.

The other side of the Janus face has to do with childhood and youth. Just as science is a historically variable and socially situated category, so, needless to say, are childhood and youth. As the papers in this issue all demonstrate, we believe, stories about the role of science in childhood and youth provide fresh perspectives on historical notions about childhood and youth. Science has played and continues to play an important role in children's and young people's lives. As historians of science, well accustomed to science's multiplicity and heterogeneity, we have an obligation to contribute to the historiography of childhood and youth by addressing the position and function of science in the early and formation stages of people's lives. However, and this is the practical lesson we had learn from engaging with this topic for so long, there is a problem for historians who want to engage with the lives of children. As historian of childhood Hugh Cunningham noted long ago, historical writing about children often has more to do with adults than with children. ‘[I]t is easier’, he wrote, ‘to write with some confidence about childhood than about children’.Footnote ³⁹ We also mentioned the difficulty of identifying children's historical agency at the beginning of our introduction.Footnote ⁴⁰ We readily acknowledge that this issue treats the topic of science for children and young people from the perspective of adults, and we strongly encourage other historians to find ways in which to make children and young people more active participants in the stories we tell about science.

A final challenge, of course, remains in bringing the two sides of the Janus face together. How do we connect the historiography of childhood and youth to that of science? In the beginning of our introduction, we proposed understanding childhood and youth as the other of science. Whatever people have thought about children reflects whatever they have thought about science, at least in some cases. We found evidence of this rather grand claim in early enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke and René Descartes, but clearly it is an idea that is in need of much more elaboration. In the course of what Swedish feminist Ellen Key in 1900 named ‘the century of the child’, childhood, youth and science surely have emerged as key social institutions and their relationships have begun to attract serious historical attention.Footnote ⁴¹ History of science should have a crucial role to play in probing the symmetrical and synchronous co-production of science and children, and we encourage other historians of science to take on this important task.