General Science: Making Different "Kinds" of Students in Need of Different Kinds of Science Education

• In Event: 75.016 - Historicizing the Present: Logics of Knowledge and Constructions of School Subjects in the Modern Era

Abstract

This paper takes as its primary event the early twentieth-century rise of General Science, a course aimed at the new “masses” of students – particularly recent immigrants – who were not expected to finish high school, let alone become professional scientists. I adopt a genealogical approach (Foucault, 1991) to analyze the emergence of General Science as a case in which different “kinds” (Hacking, 2007) of students appear as natural objects requiring different kinds of science education. I argue that this new course required making a new kind of teacher, one who could use particular theories and forms of data to see differences between groups of students and adjust their science teaching accordingly.

Following Hacking’s notion of “historical ontology” (2002), I consider the reasoning and practices that formed the assemblage of General Science students. The paper is based on primary source research with a focus on science education journals from 1916 to 1930 (e.g., General Science Quarterly). I also consider historiographical analyses of the rise of curricular differentiation, educational testing, and the social sciences in relation to these transformations in high school science education. In addition, I draw on science studies scholarship highlighting how knowledge systems (e.g., psychological stage theories) and scientific practices (e.g., analyzing test data) offer ways of seeing and knowing the world, which, in their active use, shape the world that is seen and known (e.g., Latour, 1999).

Today, discourses of differentiation and data use assume that teachers should adjust instruction to the needs of their students. Standardized test data is envisioned as a flashlight that can objectively illuminate gaps, informing instructional improvement and enabling more equitable outcomes. However, students’ needs are not directly visible but emerge within a grid of knowledge, practices and reasoning that is historically contingent (Foucault, 1991). General Science teachers were first called upon to be “prophets,” observing the moral and hygienic habits of their students in order to change the curriculum to suit their “capacity and immediate needs” (Elhuff, 1916, p. 22). Then by the 1920s, intelligence testing and increasingly diversified courses offered teachers additional ways of seeing and sorting their students (e.g., Gerry, 1920). Teachers were instructed to study the theories and methods of the social sciences to identify whether their pupils were fit for higher scientific study or whether they required scientific study to become fit for U.S. society.

The case of General Science bears on present-day debates over equity and diversity within science education. Notions taken for granted today were then under active debate, such as the idea that instead of all students taking specialized science courses (e.g. chemistry), science teachers must acquire knowledge of students’ characteristics, interests, and probable destinations to make science relevant to their everyday lives and useful to their predicted futures. Historicizing General Science offers insight into what made current practices of classification, differentiation, and adaptation possible in the first place. By examining this history, we can reconsider how U.S. science education approaches the question of which students need which kinds of science teaching, and to what ends.

Author

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison