“What happened?” a detective asks his readers at the beginning of How to Be a Nature Detective (1958). Throughout the book, readers explore animal tracks and clues to help them solve mysteries like: Who ate the rabbit? Who came to the river for a drink? Which way did the seagulls fly? Written by prolific children’s author Millicent E. Selsam, the book chronicles the process of animal identification, showing children how ordinary places can be sites of scientific observation.
“It is natural for children to be curious and to ask questions. This is also characteristic of most scientists at work,” Selsam would later write, explaining her educational philosophy. A “good” children’s science book should not be “a collection of facts” but “should stimulate a young person to hear, see, smell, and taste things—to use all of his senses to observe.”
At the 1955 Meeting of the American Nature Study Society, Selsam advocated for children’s participation in “early research,” including “[making] independent discoveries regardless of how ‘trifling’ they might be in the eyes of the graduate scientist,” according to a post-conference report. Selsam believed developing scientific habits of mind would “help young people to see that our human goals must be shaped by science and that science must be enriched by human hopes and ideals.” Like many of her mid-century peers, Selsam believed scientific methods could cultivate “rational attitudes free of superstition and prejudice,” an outlook that characterized science education during the Cold War. As the world confronted “man’s new control of the forces of nature” in the form of “atomic power” and “earth satellites,” the modern children’s science book responded to science and technology’s new role in solving humankind’s grand challenges.
Children’s Science Books Before World War II
In an examination of the history of science in early America, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt observes the importance of science to the formation of a national identity following the American Revolution.
“In the founding charters of natural history societies and learned academies,” Kohlstedt writes, “rhetoric about patriotism and presumed republican values in science and technology was commonplace.”
As American print culture expanded, middle-class families acquired access to magazines, newspapers, almanacs, journals, and other reading materials that contained a bit of science for everyone: farming and gardening advice for adult readers and natural history and “simple chemical experiments” for children. Soon, magazines like Godey’s Ladies Book and Youth’s Companion were running articles on natural history and geography. Children were a target audience for stories about the workings of the natural world.
Children’s books grew in popularity after the Civil War. With the rise of the American public library, children enjoyed expanded access to books as well as a new relationship to science in the form of the nature-study movement. Through first-hand observation of the natural world, a child would cultivate the ability “to think for himself and to maintain an individual relation to his world,” wrote Liberty Hyde Bailey, one of the nature-study movement’s leading thinkers.
Popularized alongside nature-study was a kind of “nature literature,” writes Thomas R. Dunlap, that used elements of descriptive natural history to tell stories of familiar animals, often from the animal’s perspective, such as in Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known (1898). A related subgenre, fairy science books, introduced children to botany and evolutionary biology through the perspective of magical creatures. As nature literature proliferated, the nature fakers debate—over anthropomorphism in fiction and nature writing—considered how the natural world should be portrayed in literature: should writers impose human qualities and virtues onto animals? While leaders of the nature-study movement warned against sentimentalism and make-believe, young readers were delighted by such tales.
This wasn’t the last time children’s books faced controversy over the representation of scientific ideas and the natural world. The 1925 Scopes Trial, for example, was associated with a chilling effect on library holdings related to evolution. But the professionalization of American science continued to shape the depiction of the natural world in children’s literature, turning many writers away from a Romantic framing of nature toward “[seeing] nature in terms of systems and interactions,” Dunlap writes.
The Cold War and the Rise of Modern Science Education
Debates around the direction of American science education assumed new importance toward the end of World War II as the country faced global nuclear threat. The National Science Teachers Association was founded in 1944 to set national standards for American science education. In 1950, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was established, with part of its mission to “secure the national defense.” In response to the USSR’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, the US Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958, a law which transformed public science education and American college life, more than doubling the number of students in college between 1958 and 1970.
Apart from the Space Race, there was renewed interest in how science could improve the lives of everyday Americans. The American public enjoyed significant milestones in public health, including the introduction of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in the 1950s. The country’s new regard for science education transformed public school curricula. Prior to these Cold War initiatives, elementary and secondary science education relied upon textbooks and “scientific standardization,” focusing on rote memorization of scientific facts. In the early years of the Cold War, government bulletins began emphasizing participatory learning and critical thinking, with NSF funding eventually revolutionizing the American science classroom with a new focus on experiment and other hands-on application of scientific knowledge.
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Simultaneously, a change was taking place within publishing. The Children’s Book Council formed as a nonprofit trade association by Publisher’s Weekly in 1945 to advocate for childhood literacy and quality children’s books. The end of World War II opened up new cultural exchanges, including cooperative initiatives for children’s books in translation and the establishment of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY).
In the United States, children’s science fiction, as well as non-fiction titles on science and technology, became increasingly popular, in part due to “the symbiotic relationship” between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and American public libraries, which together promoted science book collections, space exhibits, and summer reading programs oriented around NASA’s Space Race mission. In 1949, James R. Newman, famed mathematician and co-author of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, began writing an annual Christmas list of children’s science books for Scientific American, a tradition the magazine continued after his death in 1966. Recommended stocking stuffers included publications from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory featuring official photographs of Mars and the hardware of Mariner IV. The How and Why Wonder Books were frequently featured in educator book lists. This expansive series was edited by Paul E. Blackwood, a scientist and educator with the US Office of Education, who also wrote government bulletins and surveys on science education research
As interest in children’s science books grew, many educators stressed the importance of factual accuracy. Selsam reminded writers and educators that books should avoid teleological phrasing—“so that” and “nature wants or prefers”—and anthropomorphism. She also critiqued curricula that censored evolution and sex education. Sharing similar concerns, professional organizations began reviewing works for accuracy and appeal, and since 1973, the National Science Teaching Association and the Children’s Book Council have jointly released “a list of outstanding science books” for children.
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As experts debated how best to teach science to children, the “discovery-inquiry (DI) approach” was one that situated the student as scientist, explains Richard Duschl. Some children’s science book illustrators adopted this disposition in their artistic outlooks as well. The curious illustrations in How to Be a Nature Detective, drawn by Ezra Jack Keats (perhaps best known for The Snowy Day), offer readers just enough visual information to be able to ask questions—footprints in a single line, the partial view of a fluffy tail—without giving away the answers to the mysteries posed by the narrator. Meanwhile, in this new era of publishing, researchers became increasingly interested in what kind of illustrations children preferred—realistic or abstract, color or black and white—as well as how textbook art and design supported learning.
Other influences on children’s book publishing included later post-war investments in public education infrastructure such as the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the founding of Head Start child development programs. As new research on early childhood emphasized the importance of the early years to lifelong literacy, books for infants and preschoolers became increasingly popular. Meanwhile, older readers enjoyed a diversification of subject matter thanks to the emergence of “the New Realism,” an outgrowth of the turbulence and creativity of the 1960s, which sought to “[t]ell it like it is.” These books dealt with social and cultural challenges that American children faced, from private struggles like divorce and adolescence to systemic challenges such as poverty and racism. During this time, many librarians began rethinking their role in American civil defense, realizing, argues Brett Spencer,
Perhaps unsurprisingly, children’s science books also began broaching related political questions. A 1971 review by Dewey W. Chambers and Frances VanAssen for Elementary English asserts, “There is little doubt that one of the major thrusts of the curriculum for the 70’s will be a concern about ecology.” Children’s books were seen “as an undergirding force in concept development” and an opportunity to strengthen students’ understanding of the world around them as well as the national imperative “to preserve and enhance ‘America the Beautiful.’” While the decade’s most famous children’s conservation book is a fictional one—Dr. Suess’s The Lorax (1971)—the 1970s were a boon for environmental non-fiction, and frequent subject matter included pollution, mining, nuclear waste, and species extinction. This environmentalist trend in children’s books continued throughout the late twentieth century with the rise of the genre of the didactic ecomystery, perhaps the most famous of which was Jean Craighead George’s Who Really Killed Cock Robin? (1971), read by millions of elementary school students for the next several decades.
Children’s Science Books from the 1990s to Today
As federal support for public school libraries waned in the 1970s, retail sales played a new role in children’s publishing. The omnipresence of the Scholastic Corporation—made possible by sales to libraries and the quintessential book fair—propelled children’s science books into the twenty-first century. Millennials may remember Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen’s colorful Magic School Bus books, which offered children make-believe field trips to hard-to-reach places: the Milky Way Galaxy, the bottom of Earth’s oceans, and the organs of the human body, just to name a few. Dorling Kindersley (DK)’s ground-breaking Eyewitness series contained high-quality photographs that dazzled young readers. Foretelling the impact of digital culture upon global reading trends, the DK team said the goal of the Eyewitness series was “to approximate the CD-ROM” with abundant visuals. In the 1990s, young readers also remained interested in environmentalism, picking up the bestselling 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth (1990) as they championed recycling in their neighborhoods and schools.
The 1990s were also a time of transformation in science education, as educators contemplated the “nature-of-science” through different disciplinary and pedagogical paradigms, including the history and philosophy of science, write Steven Turner and Karen Sullenger. Today, two main categories of children’s science books emerge: those that tell the stories of “lived lives of scientists” (including biography and topics related to the history of science) and those that explain “accepted knowledge” (including the exploration of scientific processes and observations). Children’s science books remain a critical part of early literacy initiatives and are used in elementary and middle school for teaching inquiry skills, including “observing, inferring, posing questions, recording data, looking for patterns, and making conclusions based on the analysis of data,” write Mesut Saçkes, Kathy Cabe Trundle, and Lucia M. Flevares. And as funding for public science education shrinks, science books remain an important place to learn about today’s big challenges, with titles about citizen science, migration, biodiversity, deforestation, and climate change topping recent recommendation lists. At their best, these stories offer children a way to cultivate curiosity and a thoughtful relationship with the natural world, just as the nature-study movement advocated more than one hundred years ago.
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