Science, Technologies and Material Culture in the History of Education

Heather Ellis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429784163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Developed out of a 2015 conference of the History of Education Society, UK, this book explores the interconnections between the histories of science, technologies and material culture, and the history of education. The contributions express a shared concern over the extent to which the history of science and technology and the history of education are too frequently written about separately from each other despite being intimately connected. This state of affairs, they suggest, is linked to broader divisions in the history of knowledge, which has, for many years, been carved up into sections reflective of the academic subject divisions that structure modern universities and higher education in the West. Most noticeably this has occurred with the history of science, but more recently the history of humanities has been divided as well.

The contributions to this volume demonstrate the diversity and originality of research currently being conducted into the connections between the history of science and the history of education. The importance of objects in teaching and their value as pedagogical tools emerges as a particularly significant area of research located at the intersection between the two fields of enquiry. Indeed, it is the materiality of education, a focus on the use of objects, pedagogical practices and particular spaces, which seems to offer some of the most promising avenues for exploring further the relationship between the histories of science and education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the History of Education.

Science and public understanding: the role of the historian of education

Ruth Watts

ABSTRACT

In this article, questions of public education in both environmental issues and science, more broadly, are examined in an effort to respond to Richard Aldrich’s call for historians of education to use their skills and understanding both to inform the present and to shape a more enlightened future. In particular, the lives and work of three women in science – Marianne North, Rachel Carson and Alice Stewart – are investigated through their art, writings and actions and through autobiographical and biographical material. The focus is on issues of natural history, the environment and the use and misuse of technology arising from their scientific work. In each case, how far they challenged the scientific thinking of their day or extended public understanding is explored while consideration is also made of how they were educated for their scientific careers, what impediments they faced and how far and in what ways they overcame them.

Introduction

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, a public space for science and education, which is now on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites, includes a temple-like building displaying the paintings of Marianne North (1830–1890),¹ a self-educated scientist and artist, who, in 14 years of travels across five continents, sought to paint in their natural state the types of vegetation she saw. For the growing scientific research centre at Kew, she painted and collected plants, five eventually being named after her.² Public education became her aim as she ‘found people in general woefully ignorant of natural history’.³ To expedite this aim, following two successful smaller exhibitions of her work in London, she built the Marianne North Gallery at her own expense, where she eventually exhibited 833 of her own paintings, depicting more than 900 species of plants, and 246 types of wood that she had collected.⁴ William Botting Hemsley, whom she appointed to complete the catalogue of her paintings, claimed that she wished:

¹ See Michelle Payne, Marianne North: A Very Intrepid Painter (Kew: Kew Publishing, 2011); Marianne North, A Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North (Exeter: Webb & Bower in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1980), 121. NB: The two volumes of North’s Recollections of a Happy Life (1892; see note 14 below) were abridged into this one volume by Graham Bateman for Kew in 1980.

² Nephenthes northiana; Crinum northianum; Northia Seychellana; Kniphofia northia and Areca northiana. Payne, North, 16–17. Four of these she ‘discovered’, one Joseph Hooker, the Director, discovered from her painting.

³ North, Eden, 121.

⁴ Ibid., 11, 121, 151, 197, 216, 229; see Preface by Professor J. P. M. Brenan, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1980; Payne, North, 86–9.

other less fortunate persons to see and enjoy what she herself had seen and enjoyed so much [and that the descriptive catalogue was to include] short notes concerning the life-history, products, etc. of the plants painted, inserted with the intention of making it as instructive as possible to those who know least of such things.⁵

⁵ W. Botting Hemsley, ‘The Marianne North Gallery of Paintings of “Plants and their Homes”, Royal Gardens, Kew’, Nature (June 15, 1882): 155.

The director of Kew, Sir Joseph Hooker, wrote in the initial Catalogue of 1882 stressing the importance of her paintings in documenting tropical plant species:

it is not possible to overrate [the collection’s] interest and instructiveness in connection with the contents of the gardens, the plant-houses, and museums of Kew; objects that are among the wonders of the vegetable kingdom … though now accessible to travellers and familiar to readers of travel, are already disappearing, or are doomed shortly to disappear, before the axe and the forest fires, the plough and the flock, of the ever advancing settler or colonist. Such scenes can never be renewed by nature, nor when once effaced can they be pictured to the mind’s eye, except by means of such records as this lady has presented to us.⁶

⁶ J. D. Hooker, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, Royal Gardens Kew, Official Guide to the North Gallery (London: HMSO, 1914; 6th ed., reprinted 2009), iii–iv.

This brief introduction sets the scene for this article. Here we have a developing scientific profession, that of botany and natural history, with a woman who utilised her skills as an artist and naturalist to overcome her exclusion from scientific societies and higher education.⁷ She used her paintings and her autobiographical account of her botanical travels, in themselves partly aided by the technical innovations of the nineteenth century, including those in transport, to educate the general public in science. She saw for herself the environmental damage wrought by humanity such as the destruction of invaluable redwood forest in California, with ‘man [sic], the civiliser, wasting treasures in a few years to which savages [sic] and animals had done no harm for centuries’.⁸

⁷ Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97–9. North started her life’s work in her early forties in 1871 when women’s higher education was just beginning.

⁸ North, Eden, 88.

Marianne North, with her scientific and environmental interests and desire to spread public understanding, is very apposite here. This article has been inspired by the last professional wishes of Richard Aldrich, who died in 2014. Richard had written a series of compelling articles urging his fellow historians of education to use their understanding of their subject both to inform the present and to shape a more enlightened future in the light of changing knowledge about various environmental, scientific and technological developments.⁹ To do so is not easy when confronted with such a huge area of constantly shift ing, expanding and frequently controversial scientific knowledge, although historians of education can show how science and technology have always impinged both on and in education, with the ensuing impact on knowledge affecting educational methods, approaches and curriculum, and raising ethical questions concerning the use of and access to knowledge – issues complicated by class and gender.

⁹ Richard Aldrich, ‘Education for Survival: An Historical Perspective’, History of Education 39, no.1 (2010): 1–14; ‘Neuroscience, Education and the Evolution of the Brain’, History of Education 42 no. 3 (2013): 396–410; ‘“In search of time-tested truths”: Historical Perspectives on Educational Administration’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 46, no. 2 (2014): 220–33.

Historians of education, however, often lack any formal scientific education beyond educational science. Many, like me, have gained knowledge from the vast education available outside of schooling: from articles in quality newspapers and magazines; from museums and botanical gardens, libraries and travel; from radio, television, cinema and the internet; fiction; popular science books; the propaganda of environmental groups. In my own case, I was drawn into the history of science mostly through the history of education itself, first studying how men and women of the British Enlightenment saw scientific understanding as part of a humanist and humanistic education and then wanting to investigate why what increasingly became a significant area of knowledge denied access on gendered grounds. In doing this, I not only learned much from studying the works of specialists in other fields and realised how scientific, technological and arts subjects are intertwined¹⁰ – but made much progress through biographical studies. Similarly, Joyce Goodman, Jane Martin and Sian Roberts have eloquently written about the use of biography in women’s and educational history – a methodology that can make research accessible to many non-specialists.¹¹

¹⁰ Ruth Watts, Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).

¹¹ For example Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, Women and Education 1800–1980 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Siân Roberts, ‘In the Margin of Chaos: Francesca Wilson and Education for all in the “Teachers Republic”’, History of Education 35, no. 6 (2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: science, technologies and material culture in the history of education
• 1. Science and public understanding: the role of the historian of education
• 2. 'All your dreadful scientific things': women, science and education in the years around 1900
• 3. Household and domestic science: entangling the personal and the professional
• 4. Domesticating physics: introductory physics textbooks for women in home economics in the United States, 1914-1955
• 5. Paper, scissors, rock: aspects of the intertwined histories of pedagogy and model-making
• 6. Transnational education in the late nineteenth century: Brazil, France and Portugal connected by a school museum
• 7. Microbial metaphors: teaching 'familiar science' at a Kent sanatorium, c.1905-1930
• 8. Russian dreams and Prussian ghosts: Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University and debates over historical memory and identity in Kaliningrad
• Index