Innocent Experiments

Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States

Rebecca Onion

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469629483
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

From the 1950s to the digital age, Americans have pushed their children to live science-minded lives, cementing scientific discovery and youthful curiosity as inseparable ideals. In this multifaceted work, historian Rebecca Onion examines the rise of informal children's science education in the twentieth century, from the proliferation of home chemistry sets after World War I to the century-long boom in child-centered science museums. Onion looks at how the United States has increasingly focused its energies over the last century into producing young scientists outside of the classroom. She shows that although Americans profess to believe that success in the sciences is synonymous with good citizenship, this idea is deeply complicated in an era when scientific data is hotly contested and many Americans have a conflicted view of science itself. These contradictions, Onion explains, can be understood by examining the histories of popular science and the development of ideas about American childhood. She shows how the idealized concept of "science" has moved through the public consciousness and how the drive to make child scientists has deeply influenced American culture.

1

Wonder House

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum as Beautiful Dream

In a 1908 article in Popular Science, Anna Billings Gallup, the curator of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, described the nine-year-old institution as a paradise for scientifically minded city children: a research lab, library, and clubhouse, packaged in an enchanting old Victorian mansion. Gallup, who joined the museum’s staff in 1903, was to spend thirty-five years as its head. With a bachelor of science degree in biology from MIT, she became an educator who taught biology for four years at the Hampton School.¹ Despite her experience in a more traditional classroom environment, she saw the museum, an offshoot of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, as a superior alternative to school. “In the absence of official relations with public or private schools the museum makes no demands on its visitors,” she wrote. “It offers its privileges free to children of all ages and leaves each one to choose his own method of enjoyment.”

Gallup followed this remarkable proclamation of childhood liberation with a paragraph describing the range of sedate activities visitors might pursue within the walls of the refurbished mansion in Brooklyn. “Whether he copies a label,” she wrote, “reads an appropriate quotation, talks about the group of muskrats with his playfellows, spends an hour in the library or listens to the explanation of the museum ‘teacher,’ who gladly answers his questions and tells him stories, matters but little so long as the effect of his visit is to enhance his love for the best things in life.”²

In the distance between the wide-open possibility of the museum (“no demands”) and her actual expectations for the visitors’ experiences, there is a subtle rhetorical gap between the ideal and the real. A child could do whatever he wanted, so long as “whatever he wanted” was to pursue a positive mode of inquiry, approved by educational theory: copying, reading, conversing, researching, listening. Gallup, like other progressive educators, believed that children’s minds—if allowed to develop naturally—would gravitate toward these productive modes of inquiry. This museum, even more than a progressive school, would prove that the bent of children’s minds was positive—and, necessarily, scientific. Yet this “natural development,” paradoxically, required much attention and encouragement from adults.³

Why was Gallup writing about a children’s museum in Popular Science? While the Brooklyn Children’s Museum was technically a “children’s museum”—a designation which does not inherently predict the teaching of science—children’s education in various branches of science took pride of place in the museum’s slate of activities, and the museum’s founders and curators often gestured toward children’s scientific practice and later scientific accomplishments in their public representations of their museum’s work. The museum contained “departments” of botany, zoology, geology, meteorology, geography, and history; there was also a library stocking textbooks, popular science volumes, and magazines, including National Geographic, Nature, Bird-Lore, and some more ambitious fare, including the American Journal of Science and the Journal of Applied Microscopy.⁴

In invoking the mentally and morally improving joys of the natural world to readers of Popular Science circa 1908, Gallup was repeating familiar common wisdom. In the second half of the nineteenth century, amateur natural history and specimen collecting became a mainstream pastime for American adults, who touted the benefits of this kind of connection with nature: physical vigor, renewal of religious sentiment, healthful recreation. Numerous scientific societies concentrated individual interest in collecting through local civic associations, and books and magazines, produced and distributed through the newly powerful publishing industry and postal service, advised people in the best ways to collect flora and fauna and trumpeted the advantages of the natural history habit. Natural history museums, funded by Gilded Age wealth, run by professional naturalists, and attended by interested amateurs (who occasionally contributed to their collections) grew in number; the American Museum of Natural History was founded in 1869, the Field Museum of Chicago in 1893, and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in 1895.⁵

Children participated in the late-nineteenth-century natural history craze, reading books and magazines that advised them on how to collect and incorporated collecting into stories, as well as taking field trips with those unusual teachers who happened to take the initiative to lead them.⁶ Theodore Roosevelt colorfully remembered his own young exploits in the pages of the American Museum of Natural History’s magazine, American Museum Journal, in 1918, recalling the lessons in taxidermy his father arranged for him and self-deprecatingly describing the “worthless” observations he made of local birds in Egypt and Palestine as a fourteen-year-old. Roosevelt wrote that he was no different from any “ordinary boy who is interested in natural history”—a description that shows how common the hobby was at the time (or, at least, how common Roosevelt believed it to be).⁷

In the early twentieth century, the popularity of natural history as an adult pastime diminished. Anticruelty campaigns gave the nineteenth-century tradition of specimen collection an unsavory reputation; the use of specimens for home decoration went out of fashion as a less cluttered design aesthetic came to dominate popular taste.⁸ An urbanizing population had fewer places in which to collect. And if the Gilded Age was a time of prodigious museum building, in the early twentieth century American museums pivoted from serving as places of active scientific practice toward advancing educational missions. Children’s presence in museums—on school visits, in after-school programs—became a commonplace rather than a rarity, and some museums began to maintain collections that could be lent out to classrooms.⁹ The Brooklyn Children’s Museum was founded in 1899, after one of the curators at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences visited Europe and was impressed by exhibits at the Manchester Museum in England, which seemed to appeal to many children. Children’s museums housed in separate buildings were a particularly American phenomenon; they were also a particularly Progressive phenomenon, built on a belief that children needed a separate sphere where they could learn best. Brooklyn led the way in supporting a children’s museum; Boston followed (1913), then Detroit (1917) and Indianapolis (1925).¹⁰

In the first decades of the twentieth century, museums with child patrons were responding to and working with the nature study movement, a complex and widespread curricular initiative that gained authority at the turn of the twentieth century and retained primacy through the 1930s. The movement focused on introducing students in elementary schools to principles of scientific observation through investigations of their local environments. Drawing from the tradition of nineteenth-century natural history, with its emphasis on “studying nature, not books” (in the words of Harvard’s influential geologist and paleontologist Louis Agassiz), nature study amplified other ideas inherent in progressive education, including an emphasis on allowing children to form their own understandings through observation. Nature study drew from the anxieties of its time, manifesting a distinct critique of urban modernity in its advocacy of contact with nature.¹¹ The movement had allies in the major schools of education, supported a national society and a journal, and at its height created careers for many teachers as nature study specialists. Gallup was a founding member of the major professional group of nature study educators, the Nature-Study Society, and often wrote about the Children’s Museum’s activities in the society’s journal.¹²

Isabel L. Whitney’s Brooklyn Children’s Museum seal. Children’s Museum News, December 1924.

“ALERT FROM TOES TO CROWN”

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum seal, created in 1924 by Isabel Whitney, was meant to represent Ariel, “the sprite or spirit of childhood . . . clothed with light, the irradiant power of the universe . . . encased in a star.” Whitney wrote that she struggled to represent the concept of the museum, thinking that “such an advanced ideal as the Children’s Museum must needs be represented by the pictorial language of modernism” but adding that “today is an outgrowth of yesterday,” and so “recognized symbols of the past must help in its expression.” She therefore settled on the shining child, arms and legs outstretched, a beacon totally open for inspection.

Both Whitney and Anne Lloyd, the author of a commemorative poem titled “In the Children’s Museum” printed in the museum’s journal, Children’s Museum News, a few years earlier, participated in the Children’s Museum’s self-articulation as a safe, cozy, familial place, where children would enter a natural paradise of education. This place, full of children paying the right kind of attention to the right things, was also very pleasant for adults to regard.

I heard a happy humming
As though a swarm of bees
Over a new-found garden
Were voicing ecstasies.

It came from eager children
Who thronged upstairs and down,
Discovering fresh wonders,
Alert from toes to crown.

They listened to a legend,
And joined in nature games,
Calling the bugs and beetles
By learned Latin names.

They buzzed about strange countries,
They burrowed deep in books,
And graced the maps and pictures
With rapt and reverent looks.

America extended
Her arms to every child,
And little foreign faces
Looked up at her and smiled.

The air was warm with welcome,
They felt as free to roam
Through each enchanted chamber
As if they were at home.

And many a drop of nectar
Their young souls stored away
To make a golden honey
To sweeten life someday.¹³

In their representations of the learning child, Children’s Museum educators such as Lloyd combined a sentimental perspective with the rapt commitments of progressive education. Although pragmatism, with its disavowal of authority figures, could be considered to be full of what Max Weber called “disenchantments,” pragmatists found new enchantments in idealizing all things “modern.”¹⁴ John Dewey, pragmatist and educational philosopher (and mentor of at least one museum staff member, Louise Condit), believed that by teaching children to think scientifically, the teacher not only exploited natural tendencies of childhood but also empowered the modern individual. Progressive interest in childhood learning resulted in enchantments with childhood and science, investing the learning child with shining possibility: the ability to carry the human race further along the road to full understanding and mastery of the external environment.

Indeed, Dewey’s modern child was one who could foresee future events, manage intuitive responses, and plan rational courses of action, all using scientific thinking. The difference between this (white American) child and the “savage” of recapitulation theory was that the child represented newness and possibility, not a rote repetition of history. John Dewey’s daughter Evelyn Dewey wrote rapturously of “the modern child” in 1934: “He is set amidst resources greater than Solomon dreamed of. Science has given him the wings of the eagle, the fins of the fish, long-distance eyes and ears so that he masters space and time. Matter has become his plaything. Running it through the mold of his imagination he changes its form at will. He inherits the intimacy of the stars and even dreams of transcending the boundaries of the planet. He is the last throw out of the Pandora’s box of civilization.”¹⁵ For this child of modernity, who looks very much like “Ariel” of the Children’s Museum and whose (male) body occupies the very upper rung on the ladder of civilization, the mastery of space and time has provided new “playthings” for the “imagination.” This child combines the inheritance of resources (a rich environment, naturalized in Dewey’s prose as the province of all children), which include enhanced sensory awareness provided by technology, with his own imagination and dreams. The vision contradicts recapitulation theory. Dewey’s child is not running through the same old phases of savagery on his way to adulthood but is instead a product of accelerated evolution; his instincts should be trusted, and his interests, indulged.

The Children’s Museum educators described the museum’s physical plant, often remarked upon in discussions of the museum project, in terms of this unique balance between past and future. During its first decades, the Children’s Museum was housed in a Victorian mansion—the Adams House, in Bedford Park.¹⁶ Gallup wrote that the house’s “picturesqueness of situation” rendered it uniquely suited for this particular museum.¹⁷ The Adams House became an integral part of the museum’s self-image, appearing, for example, on the letterhead used by the Women’s Auxiliary; the mansion was emblematic of the institution itself. Caroline Worth, writing for the journal Childhood in 1922, dramatized the founding of the museum as a natural regeneration of a structure that had once housed children as a family dwelling but that had become “grim and neglected, as would any home in which the sweetness of childhood failed to enter.” The mus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Wonder House: The Brooklyn Children’s Museum as Beautiful Dream
• 2: Science in the Basement: Selling the Home Lab in the Interwar Years
• 3: Embryo Scientists: Finding and Saving Postwar “Science Talent”
• 4: Space Cadets and Rocket Boys: Policing the Masculinity of Scientific Enthusiasms
• 5: The Exploratorium and the Persistence of Innocent Science
• Conclusion: Looking Closer at “Kids Are Little Scientists”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index