ABSTRACT
One of the most developed areas in the study of school subjects is science education. The history of the subject may well explain this flourishing scholarly activity: science was a subject that achieved an established place in the secondary school curriculum only after an extensive and highly visible political struggle. This chapter provides a brief historical background but readers are directed to more comprehensive works by science specialists, most notably the summaries by Brock (1975), Jenkins (1980, pp. 27-86) and McCulloch (1993, pp. 200-46). In Britain, a substantial conflict over the form which science education would take took place in the mid-nineteenth century: this struggle, as we shall see, affords substantial insights into the social construction of the science curriculum. This dominant form would prevail not only in British state schools, but also in the curriculum of many other countries, perhaps not surprisingly given Britain’s role in the nineteenth and twentieth century as an ‘imperial centre’.
