Children of Science

How have children defined what it is to know? In this panel, we explore how science molded children, and how children modeled science. Since the mid-nineteenth century, scientists have taken babies and young children as key sites to observe knowledge acquisition in action. Children were, the scientists contended, unpolluted by prior knowledge, curious and shameless, they played seriously, developed rapidly and learned quickly. Although some researchers like Darwin found their own babies useful for naturalistic observation, children entered laboratories only at the end of the 19th century. In the new developmental sciences, children served multiple roles. They offered researchers a proxy for biological evolution, instances of human variation, models of learning and thinking, and tools to rebuild nations and create new futures. Beyond reorganizing relations of the social and biological sciences, research on children offered many women a subject pool that gave them an entrance card to scientific work and a unique view on longstanding questions of scientific method and human nature. Felix Rietmann investigates how 19th century ideas about normal and pathological childhood preceded and conditioned the later sciences of the child. Carola Ossmer investigates how film-makers and scientists at Yale produced normal babies for the New Deal. Jamie Cohen-Cole traces productive interchanges between post-positivist history and philosophy of science and experimental studies on children’s cognition: If kids shaped kinds and contents of knowledge, historians of science can find good reason to reconsider conceptions of what scientific methodology, theory and, not at least, a scientist have been.