Symposium: Reader Interest in Science - Children

Rosen, Sidney

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/1487 Copy

Description

Title

Symposium: Reader Interest in Science - Children

Author(s)

Rosen, Sidney

Issue Date

1960

Keyword(s)

Libraries --Special collections --Science

Abstract

"My interest in science was first stirred by reading the adventures of an extraordinary young man, who combined the ingenuity of an Edison with the moral integrity of a Plato and the get-up-and-go of a Horatio Alger hero. His name was Tom Swift, and I read my way through his series of adventures with marvelous rapidity. Such books, of course, were acquired (along with Frank Merriwell and Nick Carter) by a mysterious trading process; they did not sit on the shelves of my public library. After Tom Swift came The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Land That Time Forgot, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, both introducing me to the realms of historical geology. The piece -de -resistance of that glorious period of reading was Paul de Kruif's The Microbe Hunters. This work did the job of convincing me (and many of my contemporaries) that science was one of the most adventurous areas of man's knowledge. This notion of reader interest at a young age pointing the reader toward a career is not a new one. Many of the thinkers and doers in man's history were affected deeply by the reading they did when young, whether they read words printed on paper, inscribed on parchment, or heiroglyphics on papyrus and cuneiforms stabbed into wet clay. One of the first ""easy"" books on science, a forerunner of ""do-it-yourself knowledge, "" was Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry, published in England in 1820. This book sold over half a million copies in America alone, and was responsible for many young men turning to chemistry as a career; one famous example was Josiah Cooke, the great nineteenth century Harvard professor of chemistry."

Publisher

Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Series/Report Name or Number

Allerton Park Institute (7th : 1960)

ISSN

0536-4604

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1487

Copyright and License Information

Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1959.

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