ABSTRACT
During the 19th century, science became a central strategy in planning the changes of societal conditions that would transform people. The practices of science were sanctified in public life. Science had polysemous qualities, and provided practices to order, classify, and differentiate the world through its theories and methodologies of investigation. A different notion of science, powerful as well, was that life should be ordered in a rational way. This notion of science had less to do with the theories and empirical findings of science. Rationality associated with science was re-visioned and assembled as processes of reflection and acts in daily life. This latter function of science is best captured in the school curriculum in which the child was a learner and problem solver who acts towards future goals. The two different meanings of science, however, overlap in practice. The sciences of pedagogy generate principles scaffolded into the cultural theses of how the child lives as a "reasonable person." These principles connect notions of agency and freedom embodied in cosmopolitanism with, as I argue below, a collective home shaped and fashioned with the narratives of American Exceptionalism.
