Conclusion: “This Philosophy of Tops and Balls”

This short Conclusion opens with a discussion of John Newbery’s eighteenth-century scientific primer for children, Newtonianism in the Nursery. It goes on to explore the endurance of seventeenth-century ideas about childishness, experiment, and play into the eighteenth century and beyond, in the practice of modern science and in progressive educational theory. It speculates that in insisting on the isomorphism of experiment and play, members of the early Royal Society contributed to a reconfiguration in ideas about youth itself which still informs how we think about childhood and education today.