Rebecca Onion's insightful and engaging book investigates how popular conceptions of childhood and science reflected and informed larger cultural values and educational priorities in American society. In particular, the author traces changing views and representations of children “playing science” through five episodes spanning most of the twentieth century. The title of Onion's monograph, Innocent Experiments, evokes multiple meanings along these lines. One suggests that this is a story about good-natured youth directing their curiosity toward productive ends in their leisure time. An alternative interpretation is that American adults, in establishing various types of educational activities involving science, were conducting societal experiments on unsuspecting kids. Either way, Onion's book grapples earnestly and provocatively with enduring questions about why some believed that children should learn science, and how American society would benefit.
The main strength of Innocent Experiments is its chronological and topical breadth. As “a study about the way a particular cultural ideology moves through generations” (p. 169), the author skillfully engages with a diverse range of cultural artifacts, including museums, toys, novels, and student contests. Onion begins by analyzing the popularity of the Brooklyn Children's Museum in the early twentieth century, which marked an emerging trend: “American museums pivoted from serving as places of active scientific practice toward advancing educational missions” (p. 19). Subsequent chapters discuss home chemical laboratories in the interwar decades, the national quest for science talent in the postwar era, young-adult science fiction in the context of the Cold War, and Frank Oppenheimer's Exploratorium in 1970s San Francisco. These distinct episodes illuminate the cultural and civic dimensions of informal science education at various sites beyond schools. “The history of the evolution of this extracurriculum,” Onion contends, “shows how ideas about the nature of rational citizenship have mixed with changing conceptions of the nature of education, the meaning of scientific practice, and the proper duties of childhood in creating children's scientific popular culture” (p. 4). The author's interpretive acumen effectively demonstrates how and why cultural values informed educational ideals and practices in diverse public and private spaces.
Onion's thoughtful analysis within each of her five episodes aims to support a series of related claims in the book's introduction. Most prominently, she argues that popular portrayals of scientific engagement predominantly featured the curious, joyful, and sometimes mischievous leisure activities of white boys (at the frequent exclusion of girls and racial minorities). Home chemistry labs, for instance, were “the cultural province of middle-class, school-age boys, who had long expected to be allowed to romp outside with groups of male friends, while girls were kept indoors” (p. 69). Onion also proposes that the end of World War II marked a significant turning point in how Americans viewed children's “science play.” Specifically, the advent of the atomic age and Cold War evoked popular fears that the United States was intellectually and technologically inferior to the Soviet Union. Given those high stakes, the young and aspiring scientist became “a figure in need of protection—his curiosity fragile, his ego at risk” (p. 112). Generally speaking, the thematic connections across the cases discussed in Onion's five main chapters could be established more explicitly, which prompts several related questions. To what extent, for example, did the cultural tropes and educational practices in Oppenheimer's Exploratorium during the 1970s resemble or deviate from those in the Brooklyn Children's Museum in the early twentieth century? Similarly, in what ways did the gendered and civic dimensions of the Science Talent Searches of the 1940s and 1950s align with popular fiction and television programs about space exploration in the postwar era? Readers will discover that the author permits room for multiple interpretations.
Onion's integration of histories of childhood with popular portrayals of science yields a nuanced narrative about science education. Another of the book's prominent contributions, therefore, is that it encourages dialogue among neighboring scholarly communities that are not in the habit of engaging with each other. Historians of education, childhood, and science popularization will find her book valuable, as will literary and cultural scholars. Although these academic areas have distinct origins and vernaculars, all could benefit by recognizing their common interests in youth and education. For historians of education, Onion's book exemplifies how to incorporate cultural perspectives on education beyond the schoolhouse. Historians of childhood and historians of science popularization, meanwhile, can gain valuable new insights about the interrelationships between conceptions of developmental psychology and the nature of scientific inquiry. Innocent Experiments engages constructively with each of these academic communities.
Given the interdisciplinary promise of Onion's narrative, it would have been even more beneficial for the author to acknowledge more explicitly the scholarly antecedents to her own study—whether discussed in the main text or more fully in the endnotes. The broad and interdisciplinary scope of her monograph is original, yet it clearly builds on existing histories of science education, childhood, and science popularization. How, then, does her investigation of the Brooklyn Children's Museum in the early twentieth century contribute to the deep foundation of research on various forms of progressive education? To what extent does her analysis of the political purposes of science education, and the Science Talent Search more specifically, confirm or deviate from what historians of education have already claimed? In what specific ways does Onion's nuanced analysis of postwar-era science fiction align with the robust array of studies on youth fiction in that period? Explicit discussions like these could further encourage scholars across these neighboring, but distinct, disciplines to recognize their common interests, investigative methods, interpretive tools, and vernaculars.
In sum, Innocent Experiments constitutes a lively and provocative exploration of the intersections of American culture, childhood, and science that have fueled popular perceptions of science's value to society. Yet, as Onion aptly notes in her conclusion, portraits of scientific inquiry as the purely joyful curiosities of children—while diminishing its rigor, tedium, and inevitable frustrations—“can misrepresent the nature of scientific practice” (p. 167). One casualty of that tendency is the implication that such activities fall beyond the purview of adults. Indeed, if some degree of scientific understanding among citizens is necessary for the health of a democratic society, then Rebecca Onion's illuminating book begins to explain why that has proved to be such an elusive ideal.
