ABSTRACT Scientists played a key role in the first systematic introduction of nature study into North American public schools in the late nineteenth century. The initiatives of Wilbur Jackman and John Merle Coulter, affiliated with the young University of Chicago, and Liberty Hyde Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, at Cornell University, coincided with the “new education” reform movement that found object lessons and experience‐based education superior to textbook teaching. Educational psychologists and philosophers of the 1890s, including G. Stanley Hall, related (...) curriculum methods to perceived developmental stages in children, with a focus on immediate experience. Putting these pedagogical ideas—gained in summer institutes, normal schools, and programs at Chicago and Cornell—into practice were administrators and classroom teachers in both urban and rural classrooms. By 1900, a consensus about the value of nature study among scientists, community leaders, and teachers established it as the recognized general method of studying the natural world in public schools across much of the United States. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Scientists played a key role in the first systematic introduction of nature study into North American public schools in the late nineteenth century. The initiatives of Wilbur Jackman and John Merle Coulter, affiliated with the young University of Chicago, and Liberty Hyde Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, at Cornell University, coincided with the “new education” reform movement that found object lessons and experience‐based education superior to textbook teaching. Educational psychologists and philosophers of the 1890s, including G. Stanley Hall, related (...) curriculum methods to perceived developmental stages in children, with a focus on immediate experience. Putting these pedagogical ideas—gained in summer institutes, normal schools, and programs at Chicago and Cornell—into practice were administrators and classroom teachers in both urban and rural classrooms. By 1900, a consensus about the value of nature study among scientists, community leaders, and teachers established it as the recognized general method of studying the natural world in public schools across much of the United States. (shrink)

In the last three decades many historians of science have sought to account for the emergence of modern science and technology in sites that did not participate in the shaping of apparently original ideas. They have extensively used a model of the transfer of scientific ideas and practices from centres of scientific activity to a passively receptive periphery. This paper contributes to the discussion of an alternative historiographic approach, one that employs the notion of appropriation to direct attention towards the (...) receptive modes and devices of a local culture. A historiography built around the notion of appropriation deals less with the question of the faithful transfer of scientific ideas than with the particular features of the discourse produced by local scholars as the best way to overcome or conform to the constraints of the receptive culture. The case examined to describe this culturally and intellectually intricate process is the profound transformation undergone by the Newtonian concept of vis inertiae in the work of Eugenios Voulgaris , one of the most important Greek scholars of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Historians of science have identified toys as part of their subject’s material culture, but there has been little exploration of the production and use of educational or playful objects. Moreover, academic writing on science for children has focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This essay argues that our understanding of historical science education can be enhanced by exploring twentieth‐century instruments. It uses the example of Construments sets, with which children could build a wide variety of optical instruments from a (...) series of standardized parts. Invented by C. W. Hansel, a school science master, Construments were founded in and responded to contemporary educational practices and debates over “general science,” as well as addressing characteristic interwar concerns about adaptability and economy and older ideals of rational entertainment. By exploring the company’s instruments, promotional literature, and magazine, and by drawing on the memories of contemporary users, I reconstruct the contexts in which Construments were used, emphasizing the creation of heterogeneous communities vital for the transmission of skills and knowledge. (shrink)