Science, Impact on Twentieth-Century Education

Eugenics

Popular interest in human genetic variation fueled societywide developments such as the eugenics movement. According to its leading proponent, Francis Galton (1822–1911), eugenics aimed at the improvement of human traits by way of a social policy governing human reproduction. Inspired, in part, by the work of animal breeders (rather than by Mendel), Galton created statistical tools to study variation in human populations as well as the general stability of differences between race characteristics. A “hereditar-ian” school of thought developed around his work and these tools.

Formal institutional support for the school emerged with the founding of the Eugenics Laboratory at University College London (1906), the Balfour Chair of Genetics at Cambridge University (1912), and the Eugenics Record Office at New York's Cold Spring Harbor (1906). Social policy, influenced by the ideas of hereditarians, also appeared in the Immigration Act of 1924. This act sought to restrict non-western-European immigration. Meanwhile, seventeen state-level enactments supported sterilization of criminals, in many cases including those considered mentally feeble. By the 1930s, thousands of the so-called feebleminded had been sterilized as a result. The state of Virginia carried out forced sterilizations until 1972.

Educational Impacts

The work of hereditarians had an immediate and lasting impact on education. Psychologist and eugenicist Henry Herbert Goddard helped construct America's first intelligence testing instruments and also wrote one of the most popular works in eugenics, The Kallikak Family. Goddard had originally imported the work of French psychologist Alfred Binet, originator of modern intelligence testing, and drew from it when appointed to a committee of psychologists charged with sorting U.S. military personnel during World War I.

After the war, Goddard and his colleagues, including Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes, advocated the use of intelligence testing in schools to provide for an efficient means of sorting students into various tracks. What most testers believed they were testing was an inherited native intelligence unaffected by environmental factors. What Binet had long before discovered was that testing for intellectual abilities was highly influenced by social class and educational background. During the interwar period, the Army intelligence test became the foundation for the SAT. The SAT was first used mostly by high school students aiming to attend elite universities. The practice [Page 685]expanded to approximately 2 million college aspirants by 1970. The impact of eugenicist thought on education, however, extended beyond testing and made its way into the textbook.

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