Science for children and young people is an important, yet often neglected, subject in the historiography of science. It has gained attention due to the growing interest in science popularization. Like popular science, science for children and young people is a historical topic rich in fascinating stories about the ways in which scientific knowledge travels through society and culture. Although children and young people certainly belong to wider audiences for science outside the realm of specialized science, we have come to believe that studying science for children and young people allows us to probe even deeper into the ways in which science interacts with people's lives, their social relations and their hopes for the future. Children and young people since the Enlightenment have come to occupy a special role in Western society, and ideas about humankind, culture, learning, development and science have all been associated with childhood. When adults have presented scientific knowledge to children, they have not only built ideas (often ideals) about social order and proper upbringing into their materials, but also reflected upon questions about science in relation to children's capacity for acquiring new knowledge. We argue that children and young people historically and culturally constitute an important ‘other’ for science, and the historiography of science will benefit from taking on the topic of science for children and young people in this light.

Although the findings of the discipline of palaeontology had been rich enough since the 1830s to render a chronological history of nature conceivable, a recognizable genre fulfilling this purpose did not fully emerge until the 1860s. The lapse of time was largely due to the conceptual and formal difficulties of marrying content of adequate empirical credibility to a narrative of adequate readability. Early efforts were made by pedagogues and popularizers more than by men of science. This article considers four examples of such pieces, written between 1828 and 1837, and studies the ways in which their authors experimented with traditional and less traditional pedagogical formats in their various attempts to promote specific outlooks on the nature of natural process and on the place of empirical science in the education of their essentially middle-class audiences. It argues that the particular requisites of the pedagogical mode would help set the norm for the mature genre in later years.

In a period of anti-colonial political struggle and conservative reaction against liberal social reform in India, a band of Bengali men and women reached out to children through magazines with the intention of moulding them so that they would grow up to aid their nation's material progress and uphold a society bereft of colonial indignities and traditional injustices. Integral to this agenda was the attempt to explain the physical world scientifically to them, to make them knowledgeable, and to forge them into rational beings capable of looking at society critically. They wished the young to harbour a compassionate attitude towards nature, but they characterized the modern Western scientific way of knowing about the physical world as the only one worth imbibing, thereby infusing in children a bias against all who thought and lived otherwise. This science instruction was the endeavour of the avant-garde, an iconic hegemonic milieu that left its imprint in social reform and political struggle in colonial Bengali society for a long time.

This article addresses and discusses one of the first literary attempts to extend the communication of science to young people – agriculture being the case in point – through moralizing and educational novels in early twentieth-century Portugal. In this study, I show that a set of popular books on agriculture addressing horticulture, poultry farming, beekeeping, dairy farming, silkworm breeding, orchard culture and fish farming written for young people by the agricultural engineer João Coelho da Motta Prego – coupled with popularizing articles about agricultural policy and agronomy written by him in the daily press – clearly served the purpose of re-educating the Portuguese rural inhabitant and reviving the country's agriculture-based economy. The article showcases how locality drives the way science and technology are addressed, what is communicated, who writes for whom, and the purpose of the writing itself. It highlights how science popularization/popular science, in its various formats (i.e. science, technology and medicine), can be more than a way to teach science to a lay audience.

In the early twentieth century, encyclopedias addressed to children and youths became special reference works concerning science and technology education. In search of greater comprehension of this historical process, I analyse The Children's Encyclopedia’s representation of science and technology, and how it was re-edited by the North American publishing company that bought its copyrights and promoted its circulation in several countries. Furthermore, I examine how its contents were appropriated in its translations into Portuguese and Spanish, which circulated in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century. The comparison between the different versions reveals that the writings of science and technology are practically the same, with significant changes only in literature and in the approach of historical and geographical themes. I then argue that, even keeping the scientific contents virtually unchanged, these versions of the encyclopedia gave it a new meaning, because of the contexts in which they circulated. Finally, I show how the appropriations of the encyclopedia contributed to the promotion of scientific values and technological innovation as the core development and as a model of civilization for South American nations.

Meccano Magazine began publishing in 1916 to advertise the popular children's construction set. By the 1920s it had expanded into a substantial, well-illustrated monthly that eventually achieved a circulation of seventy thousand. Under the editorship of the popular-science writer Ellison Hawks it now devoted approximately half of its pages to real-life technology and some natural science. In effect, it became a popular-science magazine aimed at teenage and pre-teen boys. This article explores Hawks's strategy of exploiting interest in model building to encourage interest in science and technology. It surveys the contents of the magazine and shows how it developed over time. It is argued that the material devoted to real-life science and technology was little different to that found in adult popular-science magazines of the period, raising the possibility that Meccano Magazine’s large circulation may explain the comparative lack of success of the adult publications.

The idea that a public and secular institution was needed to prepare citizens for higher education proliferated throughout Europe during the nineteenth century. However, because of local political, economic and social contexts the underlying model of what is now meant by secondary education has developed differently in each country. This essay provides a historical account of the development of secondary education in Portugal, in what concerns the study of nature (zoology, botany, geology and mineralogy) in liceus, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the importance given to specimens and collections will be emphasized. The emergence of laboratory-based teaching never replaced traditional approaches centred on observation of specimens. By focusing on the Portuguese case, this article aims ultimately to contribute to a broader understanding of the secondary-educational model implemented throughout Europe in the nineteenth century.

During the Cold War, UNESCO played a major role in promoting science education across the world. UNESCO's Programme in Integrated Science Teaching, launched in 1969, placed science education at the heart of socio-economic development in all nations. The programme planners emphasized the role of science education in the development of human resources necessary to build a modern nation state, seeking to build a scientific and engineering mindset in children. UNESCO's interest in science education drew inspiration from early Cold War curriculum reforms in the United States, where scientists, psychologists and teachers promoted science education as a way to enhance the scientific and technical workforce and to counteract irrational tendencies. While US curriculum reformers were concerned about the quantity and quality of science teaching in secondary school, UNESCO wanted to introduce science as a topic in primary, secondary and vocational schools, promoting integrated science teaching as the best way to do this. From the outset, the term ‘integrated’ meant different things to different people. It not only entailed less focus on scientific disciplines and scientific method strictly defined, but also more on teaching children how to adopt a curious, experimental and engineering approach in life. By the end of the Cold War, UNESCO abandoned the idea of integrated science teaching, but it has a lasting legacy in terms of placing ways of teaching science to children at the heart of modern society.