Laboratories of Humanization: How Settler Colonial Techniques Prescribed Separate, Unequal US Science Educations

• In Event: Unforgetting Settler Colonial Histories of Science and Mathematics Education

Abstract

Objectives
This study addresses the erasure of segregated, settler colonial science education. While historians have scrutinized how U.S. segregated ‘Mexican schools’ served as experimental sites of attempted Americanization, whitening, and de-Mexicanization (Donato & Hanson, 2021; González, 2003; Molina, 2019), these entangled legacies have yet to be interrogated within science education, where historicity (Moura, 2025), let alone histories of settlement (Audley & D’Souza, 2022), remain rare. This paper aims to understand how techniques defining fully human persons against fabrications of indigeneity shaped the segregated science instruction offered to Mexican Americans from the early 1900s eugenics era to post-1990 equity reforms.

Perspectives
The paper interweaves STS, Settler Colonial Studies, and Curriculum Studies perspectives to historicize techniques designing colonial schools as laboratories for alchemically (Popkewitz, 2004) extracting and refining human ‘resources’ (Marquez, 2024; Nieves, 2024; Popkewitz & Huang, 2023). I ask whether and how aims of Native elimination (Wolfe, 2006) became embedded as default settings (Benjamin, 2019) of U.S. science education research designed to divide and order populations along tiered curricula.

Mode of Inquiry and Sources
Through historical epistemology (Daston, 1994), I trace how iterative updates in diagnostic techniques (Latour, 1994) of science education research prescribed lower-tier science for ‘Mexican’ pupils in efforts to extract modern humans from pathologized Indigenous foils (Deloria, 1994; Villeneuve, in press). Archival research was undertaken in four collections pertaining to early 20th-century school science (George W. Hunter Papers), segregated ‘Mexican schools’ (Gilbert G. González Papers; Los Angeles Unified School District Papers), and scientific studies purporting a ‘Mexican Problem’ (William E. Ritter Papers). These sources supplemented a prior study’s literature review of classifications of ‘Mexican’ students across the three longest-running U.S. science education journals (1901–present). Analysis entailed citational backmapping and tabular coding to trace shifting techniques.

Substantiated Conclusions
Diagnostic techniques classifying the ‘needs’ of ‘Mexican’ American students underwent updates to key terms, while reinscribing hierarchies of humanness. Early 1900s science education scholarship counterposed ‘passive Indians’ and ‘African savages’ with settler colonial land development to posit a eugenic ideal of the pioneering man of science. Meanwhile, home surveys monitored the transformation of ‘Mexican’ and other ‘less selected stocks’ into modern consumers within lower-tier industrial and domestic science. Around mid-century, remedial reforms for ‘Spanish-surname’ students sought to instill a scientific worldview of ‘mastery over nature’ credited with Anglo middle-class success and contrasted against ‘Pueblo’ values of kinship, relationality, and reciprocity. By post-1990 equity reforms, explicit foils had become subsumed in metrics of scientific attitudes, constructs of agency, and aims of humanizing students as STEM-engaged citizens. Still, such constructs’ citational trails remain tethered to prior research comparing pupils against fabrications of Indigenous (Deloria, 1994) and Africanist (Morrison, 1992) subhumanity.

Significance
This study begins excavating default settings of educational research that operationalized scientific personhood via one’s relative distancing from ‘instrumental Indians’ (Villeneuve, in press). At stake is how science education still reinscribes antiblackness and anti-indigeneity (Marquez, 2024), while naturalizing extractive views (Medin & Bang, 2014; Morales-Doyle & Booker, 2022) of people and land as inevitable futures and indices of fully human status.

Author

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison