ABSTRACT
Although laboratories for the conduct of scientific research have existed since at least the seventeenth century, the science teaching laboratory, designed and equipped to teach classes of students, is a much later development. Like other aspects of the history of science education, it is essentially a nineteenth-century phenomenon that is intimately linked with the growing professionalisation of science and the vigorous assertion of its educational claims. This chapter examines the case made for the practical teaching of science in school laboratories and outlines the growth of laboratory teaching since the late nineteenth century. Attention is also given to the role attributed to the laboratory in the science curriculum projects of the 1960s and in the science component of the National Curriculum introduced in England and Wales following the passage of the Education Reform Act 1988. It is suggested that there is now a pressing need to re-examine critically the contribution that the practical teaching of science in the laboratory can make to scientific education at school level.
