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Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States

Online ISBN:
9781469629490
Print ISBN:
9781469629476
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States

Rebecca Onion
Rebecca Onion
Ohio University
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Published:
31 October 2016
Online ISBN:
9781469629490
Print ISBN:
9781469629476
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

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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