4/16/2024 0 Comments Atomic habits media onionSteve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates were the swaggering “pirates of Silicon Valley” who created personal computing as we know it in their garages. We see Thomas Edison as a relentless, pioneering entrepreneur and Albert Einstein as an out-of-the-box thinker. When Americans do get excited about scientific discoveries made by adults, it’s still through an immature, fun-centric lens: The vast social project of science is ignored in favor of celebrity scientists mythologized as stubborn individuals-similar to cowboys on the frontier-who strike out on their own and discover unexplored territory. Wise’s Young Edison: The True Story of Thomas Edison’s Boyhood was first published in 1933. Instead, science is conceived of as something that can just descend without having much funding or requiring much organization, administration, or bureaucracy.” It diminishes the fact that a lot of major scientific discoveries have happened through great effort and many people working together over months and years. “But that doesn’t envision science as a social project. “We tend to see science as this mystical beast living in the sky that, somehow, children see more clearly because they haven’t been clouded,” Onion says. Onion thinks the pressure on kids to hit on a groundbreaking discovery is not only unrealistic but also contrary to how most advances in science happen. You can see this phenomenon when the media goes wild for any child who makes a significant scientific breakthrough. “If you follow that belief to its logical conclusion, it suggests that every human could be a scientist, or at least good friends with science, if we allowed them to develop that way.” In this crude but insidious way, the culture discourages untold numbers of adolescents from growing up to be scientists. “It’s as if adolescents are tainted because they become interested in sex,” Onion says. “At the time, the instruction manuals for kids’ chemistry sets described the American chemical industry as a patriotic venture and investing yourself in it as a patriotic act.” Inevitably, a child will lose his or her innocence, and in pop culture, that also means his scientific purity. (Images via eBay)Īfter digging into the subject, Onion concluded that Americans tend to see children as utopian figures who can tap into a pure, unfettered spirit of science, empowered to experiment and comprehend the world around them. Above: In Mark Twain’s 1885 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the titular 13-year-old boy feels most at-ease in nature, rather than in “civilized” 19th-century society. Top: A mid-century children’s birthday card depicts a cuddly kid space cadet. “And then it came to me: Science is the link that connects man-made technology and the primitive natural world.” After all, scientists have to use microscopes to view and fully understand organic cells and microbes. “At different times in our history, people were invested in the ideas of children as being modern or as being anti-modern, which is a weird paradox I find fascinating,” Onion says. At other times-say, 2017-children are thought to intuitively understand very unnatural modern technology like smartphones and laptops. While researching her American Studies master’s thesis, Onion noticed that at the turn of the 20th century, children were portrayed as having a particular affinity for animals and the natural world in general, whether they’re catching fireflies, climbing trees, or digging in the dirt. When it comes to science, it’s as if Americans revert to their collective childhoods, rejecting research data that either conflicts with their worldviews-the theory of evolution, the safety of vaccines-or just doesn’t seem, well, fun. That’s how we end up with a public that, on one hand, gets excited about topics touched on grade school-like news about Saturn’s rings or robot cars-and, on the other, fails to support important long-term research about climate or disease. The cover of Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States, by historian Rebecca Onion.
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