Summary[]
This book examines origins and intents of the science curriculum during the 1950s. From physics to the earth sciences, the scientific community made education a central plank in their efforts to reshape the social and cultural environment in which they worked. What is unique is the role of the federal government: “the United State congress appropriated funds, the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided guidance, and scientists of various sorts worked together to realize their vision of what science education should be.” Besides federal intervention, the curriculum projects emerged out of “existing classroom practices, international and domestic political tensions, wartime technologies, disciplinary rivalries…professional desires of the American scientific community,” and concerns over the life adjustment curriculum. Scientists thus volunteered their services “to the cause of education reform” and believed that science could be used to cultivate scientific thinking in American students. However, the nature of science during the 1950s and 1960s was “fundamentally political and tied directly to the rapid integration of science into the national security infrastructure o the United States.” (194) As a result, the scientific curriculum that emerged tended to emphasize content (produced by military research) rather than the mechanics and ways of thinking at the core of scientific inquiry. These efforts, he argues, offers a window onto the inner workings of the scientific community and the political struggle it wrought in schools and institutions.