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ABSTRACT
This paper reviews the current position of the history of education within the existing historiography of science and technology, and argues for the relocation of education from the periphery of the history of science and technology to its centre. It claims that it is essential to study science education in its entirety and complexity if we want to understand the generation, reproduction, circulation and transformation of scientific and technological knowledge, practices, practitioners and objects inside and outside of scientific institutions and communities. Four relocations are proposed: first, placing the history of education at the centre of our understanding of history of science and technology; second, acknowledging the diversity and heterogeneity of science and technology education; third, placing material culture at the centre of our histories of science and technology education; and, finally, provincialising Europe and North America in the history of science and technology education.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See, for example, David Kaiser, ed., Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
2 See Julie A. Reuben, ‘Education’, in The Cambridge History of Science Volume 7: The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 633–4.
3 I refer to philosopher of science Ian Hacking’s statement that ‘experimentation has a life of its own’, independently of theorising (Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 150).
4 See, for example, Antonio Clericuzio, ‘Preface’, in ‘Science Teaching in Early Modern Europe’, ed. Antonio Clericuzio, special issue, Science & Education 15, no. 2–4 (2006): 130–1; Kaiser, Pedagogy; Josep Simon, ‘The Transnational Physical Science Study Committee: The Evolving Nation in the World of Science and Education (1945–1975)’, in How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology, ed. John Krige (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 308–42.
5 José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez et al., ‘Introduction: Scientific and Technological Textbooks in the European Periphery’, Science & Education 15, no. 7–8 (2006): 657–65.
6 Marga Vicedo, ‘Introduction: The Secret Lives of Textbooks’, Isis 103, no. 1 (2012): 83–7.
7 Massimiliano Badino and Jaume Navarro, eds., Research and Pedagogy: A History of Quantum Physics through Its Textbooks (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2013).
8 Josep Simon, ‘Writing the Discipline: Ganot’s Textbook Science and the “Invention” of Physics’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46, no. 3 (2016): 392–427.
9 Adam R. Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
10 Anders Lundgren, ‘The Transfer of Chemical Knowledge: The Case of Chemical Technology and its Textbooks’, Science & Education 15, no. 7–8 (2006): 761–78.
11 Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003): 173.
12 Kathryn M. Olesko, ‘Physics Instruction in Prussian Secondary Schools before 1859’, Osiris 5 (1989): 94–120; Olesko, Physics as a Calling: Discipline and Practice in the Koeningsberg Seminar for Physics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991); Kathryn M. Olesko, ‘The Foundations of a Canon: Kohlrausch’s Practical Physics’, in Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, 323–56; John L. Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
13 Deborah Jean Warner, ‘Commodities for the Classroom: Apparatus for Science and Education in Antebellum America’, Annals of Science 45, no. 4 (1988): 387–97.
14 Steven C. Turner, ‘Changing Images of the Inclined Plane: A Case Study of a Revolution in American Science Education’, Science & Education 21, no. 2 (2012): 245–70.
15 Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Amy Ackerberg-Hastings and David Lindsay Roberts, Tools of American Mathematics Teaching, 1800–2000 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
16 Jane Insley, ‘Paper, Scissors, Rock: Aspects of the Intertwined Histories of Pedagogy and Model-Making’, History of Education 46, no. 2 (2017): 210–27.
17 Pete Langman, ‘The Audience is Listening: Reading Writing about Learning by Doing’, in Learning by Doing: Experiments and Instruments in the History of Science Teaching, ed. Peter Heering and Roland Wittje (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2011), 31–54.
18 Deborah Jean Warner, ‘Science Education for Women in Antebellum America’, Isis 69, no. 1 (1978): 58–67.
19 Marsha L. Richmond, ‘“A Lab of One’s Own”: The Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women at Cambridge University, 1884–1914’, Isis 88, no. 3 (1997): 422–55.
20 Claire G. Jones, ‘“All your Dreadful Scientific Things”: Women, Science and Education in the Years around 1900’, History of Education 46, no. 2 (2017): 162–75; Joanna Behrman, ‘Domesticating Physics: Introductory Physics Textbooks for Women in Home Economics in the United States, 1914–1955’, History of Education 46, no. 2 (2017): 193–209; Bridget Egan and Joyce Goodman, ‘Household and Domestic Science: Entangling the Personal and the Professional’, History of Education 46, no. 2 (2017): 176–92.
21 Cyrus C. M. Mody and David Kaiser, ‘Scientific Training and the Creation of Scientific Knowledge’, in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Edward J. Hackett et al., 3rd edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007): 377–402; Andrew Warwick and David Kaiser, ‘Conclusion: Kuhn, Foucault, and the Power of Pedagogy’, in Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, 393–409.
22 Warwick, Masters of Theory, 3–4.
23 Warwick and Kaiser, ‘Conclusion’, 394, 400–1.
24 Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Second Edition, Enlarged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
25 William H. Brock, ‘Science Education’, in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. Robert Olby et al. (London: Routledge, 1990), 946.
26 Heather Ellis, ‘Editorial: Science, Technologies and Material Culture in the History of Education’, History of Education 46, no. 2 (2017): 143.
27 Warwick and Kaiser, ‘Conclusion’, 393.
28 Kathryn M. Olesko, ‘Science Pedagogy as a Category of Historical Analysis: Past, Present, and Future’, Science & Education 15, no. 7–8 (2006): 864, 863.
29 Ellis, ‘Editorial’, 143.
30 See, for example, David M. Knight, ‘Scientists and Their Publics: Popularization of Science in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Science Volume 5: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, ed. Mary Jo Nye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 72–90; Arne Schirrmacher, ed., Communicating Science in Twentieth Century Europe, Preprint 385 (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2009); Peter J. Bowler, ‘Popular Science’, in The Cambridge History of Science Volume 6: The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, ed. Peter J. Bowler and John V. Pickstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 622–33.
31 See, for example, Pamela Gossin, ‘Literature and the Modern Physical Sciences’, in Nye, Cambridge History of Science Volume 5, 91–109; James A. Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
32 Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agustí Nieto-Galan and Enrique Perdiguero, eds., Popularising Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009).
33 Paul Forman, John L. Heilbron and Spencer Weart, ‘Physics circa 1900: Personnel, Funding, and Productivity of the Academic Establishments’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 5 (1975): 1–185.
34 David Cahan, ‘The Institutional Revolution in German Physics, 1865–1914’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 15, no. 2 (1985): 1–65.
35 Warner, ‘Commodities for the Classroom’, 387.
36 Robert Fox and Graeme Gooday, eds., Physics in Oxford 1839–1939: Laboratories, Learning, and College Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5–6.
37 Frederic L. Holmes, ‘The Complementarity of Teaching and Research in Liebig’s Laboratory’, Osiris 5 (1989): 121–64.
38 Roland Wittje, ‘“Simplex sigillum veri”: Robert Pohl and Demonstration Experiments in Physics after the Great War’, in Learning by Doing: Experiments and Instruments in the History of Science Teaching, ed. Peter Heering and Roland Wittje (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2011), 317–48.
39 Michael Aaron Dennis, ‘A Change of State: The Political Cultures of Technical Practice at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 1930–1945’ (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1991), 24.
40 Ibid., 123, 153; see also Roland Wittje, ‘Acoustics, Atom Smashing and Amateur Radio: Physics and Instrumentation at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in the Interwar Period’ (Dr.philos diss., Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, 2003), 47–8.
41 Olesko, ‘Physics Instruction’.
42 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ‘Parlors, Primers, and Public Schooling: Education for Science in Nineteenth-Century America’, Isis 81, no. 3 (1990): 425. See also Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Teaching Children Science: Hands-On Nature Study in North America, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
43 Michelle Hoffman, ‘Learning in the Laboratory: The Introduction of “Practical” Science Teaching in Ontario’s High Schools in the 1880s’, in Learning by Doing: Experiments and Instruments in the History of Science Teaching, ed. Peter Heering and Roland Wittje (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2011), 177–205; Simon Schaffer, ‘How Disciplines Look’, in Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences, ed. Andrew Barry and Georgina Born (London: Routledge, 2013), 57–81; Heather Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918 (London: Palgrave), 133–41.
44 Mody and Kaiser, ‘Scientific Training’; Warwick, Masters of Theory.
45 Wittje, ‘Acoustics, Atom Smashing and Amateur Radio’, 55, 67, 86, n. 193.
46 Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini, eds., Education, Technology and Industrial Performance in Europe, 1850–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Anna Guagnini, ‘Worlds Apart: Academic Instruction and Professional Qualifications in the Training of Mechanical Engineers in England, 1850–1914’, in Education, Technology and Industrial Performance in Europe, 1850–1939, ed. Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–41; Terry Shinn, ‘The Industry, Research, and Education Nexus’, in The Cambridge History of Science Volume 5: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, ed. Mary Jo Nye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 133–53.
47 See, for example, Annie Canel, Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers 1870s–1990s (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000).
48 Amy Slayton, ‘Minority Engineering Education in the United States since 1945: A Research Proposal’, in Technology and the African American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study, ed. Bruce Sinclair (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 171–85; Amy, Slayton, Race, Rigour, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Colour Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
49 See Karl-Heinz Manegold, Universität, Technische Hochschule, Industrie: Ein Beitrag zur Emanzipation der Technik im 19. Jahrhundert unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Bestrebungen Felix Kleins (Berlin: Drucker & Humblot, 1970) for the development in Germany.
50 Fox and Guagnini, Education, Technology and Industrial Performance, 8.
51 Wolfgang König, ‘Technical Education and Industrial Performance in Germany: A Triumph of Heterogeneity’, in Education, Technology and Industrial Performance in Europe, 1850–1939, ed. Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65–87.
52 Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); S. Anandhi and Aarti Kawlra, ‘Caste, Craft and Education in India and Sri Lanka: An Introduction’, Review of Development & Change 23, no. 2 (2018): 5–18; Shahana Bhattacharya, ‘Transforming Skin, Changing Caste: Technical Education in Leather Production in India, 1900–1950’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 55, no. 3 (2018): 307–43.
53 Graeme Gooday, ‘Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain’, British Journal for the History of Science 23, no. 1 (1990): 51.
54 Graeme Gooday, ‘Fear, Shunning, and Valuelessness: Controversy over the Use of “Cambridge” Mathematics in Late Victorian Electro-Technology’, in Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, 111–49; Roland Wittje, The Age of Electroacoustics: Transforming Science and Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 55.
55 Deborah Jean Warner, ‘What Is a Scientific Instrument, When Did It Become One, and Why?’, British Journal for the History of Science 23, no. 1 (1990): 84; Jim Bennett and Sofia Talas, eds., Cabinets of Experimental Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
56 Warner, ‘Commodities for the Classroom’, 387.
57 Warner, ‘What Is a Scientific Instrument’, 86.
58 Ibid.
59 Josep Simon and Mar Cuenca-Lorente, ‘Science Education and the Material Culture of the Nineteenth-Century Classroom: Physics and Chemistry in Spanish Secondary Schools’, Science & Education 21, no. 2 (2012): 227–44.
60 Marta C. Lourenço, ‘Between Two Worlds: The Distinct Nature and Contemporary Significance of University Museums and Collections in Europe’ (doctoral thesis, Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, Paris, 2005); Sébastien Soubiran, Marta C. Lourenço, Roland Wittje, Sofia Talas and Thomas Bremer, ‘Initiatives européennes et patrimoine universitaire’, La Lettre de l’OCIM 123 (May–June 2009): 5–14.
61 See, for example, Roland Wittje and Ola Nordal, Universitetshistoriske samlinger ved NTNU (Trondheim: Tapir akademisk forlag, 2005).
62 See, for example, Christopher Whitehead, Museums and the Construction of Disciplines: Art and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 2009).
63 Wittje, The Age of Electroacoustics, 231, n. 23; see https://tu-dresden.de/kustodie/sammlungen-kunstbesitz (accessed September 9, 2021) for the historical collections of the TU Dresden.
64 Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood, eds., Models: The Third Dimension of Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Oliver Zauzig, David Ludwig and Cornelia Weber, eds., Das materielle Modell: Objektgeschichten aus der wissenschaftlichen Praxis (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014); Anja Sattelmacher, Anschauen, Anfassen, Auffassen: Eine Wissensgeschichte Mathematischer Modelle (Berlin: Springer, 2021).
65 Paolo Brenni, ‘The Evolution of Teaching Instruments and Their Use Between 1800 and 1930’, Science & Education 21, no. 2 (2012): 191–226; Lissa L. Roberts, ‘Instruments of Science and Citizenship: Science Education for Dutch Orphans During the Late Eighteenth Century’, Science & Education 21, no. 2 (2012): 157–77; Josep Simon, José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez and Antonio García-Belmar, ‘Nineteenth-Century Scientific Instruments in Spanish Secondary Schools’, in Spaces and Collections in the History of Science: The Laboratorio Chimico Overture, ed. Marta C. Lourenço and Ana Carneiro (Lisbon: Museum of Science of the University of Lisbon, 2009), 161–78; Simon and Mar Cuenca-Lorente, ‘Science Education’; Sofia Talas, Museo degli strumenti di fisica del liceo Tito Livio di Padova (Treviso: Canova, 2010); Sofia Talas, Casa, famiglia e diavoletto di Cartesio, la collezione di strumenti scientifico-didattici dell’Istituto Scalcerle di Padova (Treviso: Canova, 2012).
66 See, for example, Peter Heering’s study of eighteenth-century solar microscopes (Peter Heering, ‘The Enlightened Microscope: Re-enactment and Analysis of Projections with Eighteenth-Century Solar Microscopes’, British Journal for the History of Science 41, no. 3 (2008): 345–67).
67 Wittje, ‘“Simplex sigillum veri”’.
68 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), for the notion of provincialising Europe.
69 Josep Simon, ‘Cross-National Education and the Making of Science, Technology and Medicine’, History of Science 50, no. 3, (2012): 251–6; Josep Simon, ‘Cross-National and Comparative History of Science Education: An Introduction’, Science & Education 22, no. 4 (2013): 763–8.
70 James A. Secord, ‘Knowledge in Transit’, Isis 95, no. 4 (2004): 665–6.
71 Marwa Elshakry, ‘When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections’, Isis 101, no. 1 (2010): 98–109.
72 Senthil Babu, ‘Memory and Mathematics in the Tamil Tinnai Schools of South India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, International Journal for the History of Mathematics Education 2 (2007): 15–37; Senthil Babu, ‘Indigenous Traditions and the Colonial Encounter: A Historical Perspective on Mathematics Education in India’, in Mathematics Education in India: Status and Outlook, ed. Ramaswamy Ramanujam and K. Subramaniam (Mumbai: Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, 2012), 37–62, http://mathedu.hbcse.tifr.res.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/INP-Book_Mathematics-Edu-in-India_2012_KS-RR.pdf (accessed June 12, 2021); Senthil Babu, Mathematics and Society: Numbers and Measures in Early Modern South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2022).
73 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), 159–80.
74 Schaffer, ‘How Disciplines Look’.
75 S. Birgül Tantekin-Ersolmaz, Ekrem Ekinci and Gülsün Saglamer, ‘Engineering Education and Practice in Turkey’, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 25, no. 2 (2006): 26–35; Juan C. Lucena, ‘De Criollos a Mexicanos: Engineers’ Identity and the Construction of Mexico’, History and Technology 23, no. 3 (2007): 275–88.
76 See Simon, ‘The Transnational Physical Science Study Committee’, for the export of physics curricula by the United States.
77 Stuart W. Leslie and Robert Kargon, ‘Translating American Models of the Technical University to India and South Korea’, in Sciences et Développement, ed. M. Barrere (Paris: 1996), 153–66; Leslie and Kargon, ‘Exporting MIT: Science, Technology, and Nation-Building in India and Iran’, Osiris 21 (2006): 110–30; Ross Bassett, The Technological Indian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
78 Kim P. Sebaly, ‘The Assistance of Four Nations in the Establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology 1945–1970’ (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1972).
79 Roland Wittje, ‘The Establishment of IIT Madras: German Cold War Development Assistance and Engineering Education in India’, Technikgeschichte 87, no. 4 (2020b): 357.
80 Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, ‘Scientific Equity: Experiments in Laboratory Education in Ghana’, Isis 104, no. 4 (2013): 713–41.
81 Roland Wittje, ‘Engineering Education in Cold War Diplomacy: India, Germany, and the Establishment of IIT Madras’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 43, no. 4 (2020a): 560–80; Wittje, ‘The Establishment of IIT Madras’.
82 Katya M. Z. Braghini, ‘The Collection of Scientific Instruments of the Colégio Marista Arquidiocesano Museum, São Paulo: Origins, Context and Significance’, 277–96; Marcus Granato and Liliane Bispo dos Santos, ‘The Physics Teaching Instruments at Colégio Pedro II, Rio de Janeiro: Study and Preliminary Results’, 231–46; Reginaldo Alberto Meloni, ‘Tools for Teaching Physics and Chemistry in Secondary Schools: The Case of the Colégio Culto à Ciência, Brazil, 1899–1902’, 247–57; Maria Cristina de Senzi Zancul and Elton de Oliveira Barreto, ‘Scientific Instruments for Physics Teaching in Brazilian Secondary Schools, 1931–1961’, 259–76, all in Scientific Instruments in the History of Science: Studies in Transfer, Use and Preservation, ed. Marcus Granato and Marta C. Lourenço (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins, 2014), http://site.mast.br/hotsite_scientific/index.html (accessed September 9, 2021).
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Roland Wittje
Roland Wittje is Associate Professor of the History of Science and Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, and President of the Scientific Instrument Commission of the IUHPST/DHST. His publications include The Age of Electroacoustics: Transforming Science and Sound (2016) and Learning by Doing: Instruments and Experiments in the History of Science Teaching (edited with Peter Heering, 2012).