Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States
Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States
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Abstract
Since World War II, the American discourse around children and science has been held in the form of a postmortem: a series of diagnoses pointing to a commitment gap that never seems to be fixed. The formation “Children don’t love science like they used to” points to an imagined past, full of the joy of experimentation and discovery. Although some now argue that we no longer actually face a scientific “manpower shortage,” the popular belief that we do is deeply ingrained, coming, as it does, from this vision of a lost time of utopian explorations. This book, a twentieth-century cultural history of the “science kid,” asks what the stakes of this belief might be. It argues that the nostalgic vision of “a time when American kids loved science” tends to represent these “science kids” as male. If we’re stuck associating the qualities of a potential young scientist—curiosity, mischievousness, a certain free way of thinking that sometimes borders on the antisocial—with masculinity, what effect might this persistent set of associations have on the attempt to recruit women into STEM fields?
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Front Matter
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Introduction A Curious Century
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1
Wonder House: The Brooklyn Children’s Museum as Beautiful Dream
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2
Science in the Basement: Selling the Home Lab in the Interwar Years
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3
Embryo Scientists: Finding and Saving Postwar “Science Talent”
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4
Space Cadets and Rocket Boys: Policing the Masculinity of Scientific Enthusiasms
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5
The Exploratorium and the Persistence of Innocent Science
- Conclusion Looking Closer at “Kids Are Little Scientists”
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End Matter
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