Interview, Nursing Clio Blog
As I wrote in my book’s conclusion, I was a child who always thought I should be more interested in STEM things than I was. Somewhere along the line — probably because I read some book hailing from the same genre of promotional children’s culture I explore in my history — I picked up the idea that children were inherently fascinated in making and experimenting. I wasn’t! I liked reading and writing, and I agonized over it; I wondered what was wrong with me. Thinking back on that experience as a graduate student academically interested in how prescriptive or didactic children’s culture affects children’s lives, I began to be intrigued by thinking about the history of science promotion, when viewed as a history not just of education, but of ideology.