‘Mere Amateurs’? Elementary Teachers and the Making of Scientific Authority in the British Child Study Movement

Abstract This article offers new perspectives on the relationship between elementary teaching, scientific expertise and the professionalization of the human sciences. Previous scholarship has demonstrated the ready existence of ‘amateur’ science societies in the nineteenth century where cross‐class exchanges were common. While most scholars contend that science had largely professionalized by the early twentieth century, this article complicates that narrative by examining the role of lower‐middle‐class elementary teachers in the British child study movement, particularly focusing on London. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the role played by professional organizations for lower‐middle‐class men in the early twentieth century. This research adds to that picture by investigating the importance of scientific associational culture and support through child study organizations for teachers. The article argues that London ‘child study’ was shaped into a collaborative space with opportunities for professional development by its lower‐middle‐class teachers. The article centres the intersecting roles of class, gender and profession in shaping access to scientific expertise and considers how this was navigated by teachers of both genders. I argue that teachers used the child study movement to create ‘portable expertise’ – status that could be moved over professional boundaries between the educational and scientific spheres. These strategies for crafting expertise and mutual support were met with ambivalence and sometimes resistance from elite medical actors within the child study community, culminating in conflicts over the authority to produce and make use of scientific knowledge about children.