John L. Rudolph

Turning science to account: Chicago and the general science movement in secondary education, 1905-1920.

In the second decade of the twentieth century a new subject appeared in American high schools, aimed at providing citizens with an understanding of the essential nature of scientific thinking. “General science,” as it was called, was developed and promoted by an emerging class of professional educators who sought to offer a version of science that they believed would both excite public interest and prove useful in the everyday lives of the masses of students streaming into the rapidly expanding institution of secondary education. It was to be a course with real utility that would transcend the boundaries of the specialized, abstract disciplinary subjects like chemistry and physics—subjects with identities tied to the practices and standards of the colleges and universities, which had long exerted control over the content of secondary schooling. This essay recounts the origins of general science and, in particular, examines how the intellectual and material environment of the city of Chicago at the turn of the century influenced the course that was produced and widely adopted in school programs across the United States.

Historical writing on science education: a view of the landscape

This article surveys historical scholarship on science education over the last 15 years and lays out a map of the different approaches to writing about this topic found in a variety of disciplines and fields. The hope is to provide scholars interested in science education past and present a better understanding of how this enterprise has functioned in western culture, both in terms of training future scientists and managing the relationship between science and the lay public. Highlighted in this article is the compartmentalised nature of current work which, I argue, presents an obstacle to more productive thinking about the history of science education in modern society.

Dewey’s “Science as Method” a Century Later Reviving Science Education for Civic Ends

Over a hundred years ago, John Dewey delivered his now-well-known address “Science as Subject-Matter and as Method” to those assembled at the Boston meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which he lamented the nearly exclusive focus on content knowledge in early-20th-century school science classrooms. This article revisits Dewey’s talk and examines the development of science education in the United States in the years since that address. Dewey’s critique of science education in 1909 provides fertile ground for a renewed critique of science education practices today. It is argued that there is, specifically, a need to recover the rapidly fading civic aims of science teaching, which requires greater attention to the methods of science—the idea Dewey highlighted so strongly back then.

Ideology and Education

As the hostilities of World War II drew to a close in the middle of the twentieth century, the war-weary nation turned its attention to longneglected domestic concerns. Americans entered the new peace fully expecting to realize their dreams of living the good life they had fought to secure. Pent-up savings, along with government housing and education programs for returning GIs fueled a postwar boom that lasted throughout the 1950s. New suburban communities sprang up across the country and were quickly filled by “the most amazing social trend of the postwar era”—the baby boom.1 The growing population of children soon made its way into the nation’s classrooms, drawing public attention as never before to the schools. But, while parents busied themselves with bake sales, PTA meetings, and school plays, international events generated an underlying anxiety that touched the daily affairs of nearly all Americans. Since the end of the war, the nation had only begun to learn to live with the atomic bombs that had burst onto the scene in the skies over Japan. The existence of nuclear weapons, even in a peaceful world, was enough to make one pause and ponder the ultimate fate of humanity. The growing Cold War with the Soviet Union, however, brought home the possibility that another, more devastating war might actually take place.

PSSC: Engineering Rationality

The technocratic approach to curriculum design articulated by the Apparatus on Teaching group at Woods Hole would have received unmitigated praise from the national security officials within the Eisenhower administration had the new curriculum materials been tuned solely to produce greater numbers of scientists.The imperatives of national security required a no more nuanced view of science education than this; increasing the absolute number of technically-proficient citizens was all that was needed. The chairman of the NSF’s Division of Scientific Personnel and Education had little difficulty recognizing this. “The Government’s interest,” he observed, “is primarily in having the tools necessary for defense,” and it was increasingly apparent to everyone, as another divisional committee member stated, that “science is [now] the most important arm of defense.”1 The needs of the scientific community, as we have seen, however, diverged sharply from those of the national security apparatus.Thus, with respect to NSF’s curriculum reform program, what the government sought to purchase—primarily technical expertise—differed significantly from what Zacharias and the rest of the scientists at NSF were prepared to sell: science education designed to meet “the Foundation’s highest ideal”— the “furtherance of research as a vital part of the intellectual, moral, and cultural strength of America.”2 Given the leverage scientists possessed (the belief that only they had the appropriate training necessary to produce more of their own), it was clearly a seller’s market.

BSCS: Science and Social Progress

Late in the summer of 1960 at the University of Colorado, BSCS Chairman Bentley Glass addressed the cohort of teachers that had volunteered to teach the first drafts of the biology course that had been hastily put together over the previous few months.1 He began his talk by recounting the revolutionary progress that biology had made since the beginning of the century, noting the various developments in the fields of genetics, biochemistry, and medicine. With almost messianic fervor he sought to capture the awe of the assembled teachers and enlist their support in paving the way for the revolutions in biology to come. “What will biology be in the year 2000?” he asked rhetorically. “We will probably learn,” he began modestly, “how to increase the human life span.” He grew bolder:“I would suspect that by 1990 biologists will have learned how to create some simple forms of living organisms … and that geneticists will have learned how to replace defective genes with sound ones.” Glass also predicted that biologists would learn how to conduct artificial photosynthesis and, above all, “man will certainly have learned to accelerate his own evolution in a desired direction.” The question was “what direction will he desire”?

Science/Education Transformed

In May 1960, while PSSC was preparing its course for nationwide distribution and BSCS was deep into its writing phase, John Hersey’s book The Child Buyer was published.Written in the form of hearings before a senate committee on education,welfare, and public morality, the novel described the fictional exploits of Wissey Jones, a vice president in charge of human procurement for the U.S. conglomerate United Lymphomilloid, following his arrival in the small New England town of Pequot. His purpose there was to secure the purchase of a local ten-year-old child prodigy. As the story unfolds, the reader learns that U. Lympho, as the company is known, has contracted with the federal government to conduct top-secret research crucial to the country’s national security, and Jones is out to accumulate the raw material for the project. “I buy brains,” he states under questioning, brains that have not yet “been spoiled by … what passes for education”; brains that will be accelerated and enhanced through a highly technical process developed at U. Lympho and administered through Hack Sawyer University, an institution of higher education that might one day provide a template for a new kind of learning.1 The training process, Jones explained to the senate committee in the book, had the power to multiply the IQ of its specimens nearly tenfold, primarily by eliminating the emotional energy brilliant children often spent in the largely futile search “for meaning, for values, for the significance of life.”2

NSF, Education, And National Security

Even with the scientific community’s keen interest in education as a means to correct the public image of their work, and the clearly evident inadequacies of American education brought to light in the early 1950s, few scientists considered the public schools a viable forum for disseminating their view of science.The decentralized organization of the American school system made any aspirations for comprehensive reform, along whatever lines, difficult to envision. The highly charged political atmosphere that attended the early curriculum debates over life-adjustment education, moreover, made involvement in education at the pre-college level even less attractive. From the federal government’s point of view, issues surrounding the quality and aims of schooling were best left where they had always been, safely in the hands of local communities.