Excerpt from Part 1 of The Mismeasure of Education:
Zealots for the Elimination of
Waste
The educational significance of
the results to be obtained from careful measurements of the intelligence of
children can hardly be overestimated. Questions relating to the choice of
studies, vocational guidance, schoolroom procedure, the grading of pupils, promotional schemes, the study of
the retardation of children in the schools, juvenile delinquency, and the
proper handling of subnormals on the one hand and gifted children on the other—all
alike acquire new meaning and significance when viewed in the light of the
measurement of intelligence as outlined in this volume . . . . More than all
other forms of data combined, such tests give the necessary information from
which a pupil’s possibilities of future mental growth can be foretold, and upon
which his further education can be most profitably directed. –Elwood P. Cubberley, from
foreword for Terman’s The Measurement of
Intelligence, 1916 (p. viii).
Following the importation of British
statistical procedures by American psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1903,
“standards of deviation and correlations of coefficients were in the air”
(Rugg, 1975, p. 295) by 1910, so much so that the study of education, which was
preoccupied with becoming the newest of the social sciences, henceforth, would
be driven by the urge to quantify and tabulate all aspects of schooling, as
noted here in Harold Rugg’s summary of developments in the early 20th
Century:
The
steps by which the new educational measurers began to apply methods of research
to the study of the curriculum were: first, the construction and use of tests
in arithmetic, spelling, language, algebra, etc.: second, the inventory of the
current curriculum by the tabular analysis of “courses” of study and textbooks:
third, the determination of socially worth while skills and knowledge by the
tabulation of actual human activities; fourth, . . . the careful determination
of trends in social development, the chief institutions and problems of
contemporary life, standards of appreciation, etc. (p. 296).
Accompanied,
too, by hopes that scientific quantification could make social problems
efficiently manageable, something new called intelligence testing was seen as a
godsend toward achieving the task, despite the fact that inventors of
intelligence tests had something else in mind.
When Alfred Binet, for instance, developed the first intelligence tests
at the behest of the French education ministry (Black, 2003, pp. 76-78) during
the first decade of the 20th Century, it was to help identify those
children needing special assistance in schools where attendance had recently
been made compulsory. By 1912, however,
a prominent leader of the American eugenics movement, Henry Goddard, had
adapted Binet’s intelligence test for use in screening and sorting Eastern
European immigrants, many of whom were Jewish.
Goddard and other eugenicists found in the intelligence test a
purportedly objective way to quantify the structural racism of the day and to
have it accepted as scientific, all the while protecting the American citizenry
from the continued influx of impure and unfit immigrants, who were viewed as
threats to the health of the American gene pool. In 1916, a colleague of Goddard’s, Robert
Yerkes, developed the Alpha A and Alpha B intelligence tests, which were used
to screen and efficiently sort enlistees for the U. S. Army leading up to World
War I. Those with high scores were more
likely to end up with desk jobs, and those with low scores were more likely to
end up in combat roles. That same year
Stanford psychologist, Lewis Terman (1916), published The Measurement of Intelligence, wherein he established his vision
for test use in schools based on the fine-grained sorting of “defectives,”
which he believed could be calibrated by using tests:
. . . intelligence
tests are rapidly extending our conception of "feeble-mindedness" to
include milder degrees of defect than have generally been associated with this
term. The earlier methods of diagnosis caused a majority of the higher grade
defectives to be overlooked. Previous to the development of psychological
methods the low-grade moron was about as high a type of defective as most
physicians or even psychologists were able to identify as feeble-minded. . . .It is safe to
predict that in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands
of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of
society. This will ultimately result in
curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an
enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency. It is hardly
necessary to emphasize that the high-grade cases, of the type now so frequently
overlooked, are precisely the ones whose guardianship it is most important for
the State to assume (p. 7).
By 1922, Columbia
College was using E. L. Thorndike’s Tests
for Mental Alertness (Synnott, 2010, p. 18) to limit the number of Jews
among its student body. Incensed by what
he considered a racist portrayal of the new Ivy League testing policy by
reporters from The Nation, Columbia’s
Dean Herbert E. Hawkes, a mathematician by training, shared his rationale
(Columbia Documents, n. d.) for the “mental test” in a letter to Professor E.
B. Wilson:
What we have been trying to do is to eliminate the low
grade boy. . . .We have not eliminated boys because they were Jews and do not
propose to do so. We have honestly attempted to eliminate the lowest grade of
applicant and it turns out that a good many of the low grade men are New York
City Jews. It is a fact that boys of foreign parentage who have no background
in many cases attempt to educate themselves beyond their intelligence . . . . I
do not believe however that a College would do well to admit too many men of
low mentality who have ambition but not brains. At any rate this is the
principle on which we are going.
The primitive and biased tests
effectively reduced Jewish enrollment by half, from 40 percent to around 20
percent (Synnott, 2010, p. 18), and the “mental test” remained a screening tool
until the late 1930s, when the grip of the eugenics craze stateside began to
give way as the German fascist mirror finally allowed Americans to glimpse
where their own social engineering could be headed.
By the
1920s Terman’s Stanford-Binet intelligence test was being administered to over
a million children a year (Mondale & Patton, 2001) in order to sort school
children into curriculum tracks that would funnel them into adult job
roles. Ostensibly to differentiate the
learning needs of students and to increase American economic competitiveness
with the rest of the world, many
immigrant children, particularly Mexican children in California (Stern, 2005,
pp. 95-99), were given the test in a language they did not understand and
placed in the kinds of industrial training programs first introduced following
the Civil War and the Indian Wars for former slaves and American Indian
children at boarding schools like Hampton Institute (Anderson, 1988). Others were slotted into vocational programs,
business curriculums, and college prep, all under the banner of progressive
social policy and social efficiency.
The early 20th Century era of
school testing was driven, then, by psychologists looking to expand the
influence of intelligence testing and by a new generation of school
administrators seeking to apply scientific management techniques developed by
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911/1967) for industry and business to all areas of
school operations. These new disciples
of social efficiency became “zealot[s] for the elimination of waste” (Kliebard,
2004, p. 20), from curriculum making to the sorting of students. Kliebard cites former muckraker and
self-proclaimed efficiency expert, Joseph Mayer Rice, as advocating in 1913[i]
for what sounds much like today’s corporate education reform goal of “a
scientific system of pedagogical management [that] would demand fundamentally
the measurement of results in the light of fixed standards” (p. 20). Rice (1913)
called for “a system of management specifically directed toward the elimination
of waste in teaching, so that the children attending the schools may be duly
rewarded for the expenditure of their time and effort” (p. viii). The assembly line became the metaphor for
school production, and IQ testing provided the scientific analysis for which
line the raw material ended up in to be molded into one of several models. If the new social engineers had their way and
could see their dream realized, such differentiated instruction would assure
efficiency and the elimination of waste. As we shall see, the “elimination of
waste” takes on a darker meaning as we examine ideology-driven social sorting
on an industrial scale.
What resulted from that first generation
of testing and sorting was a system that continues today to provide
“scientific” rationalization for the creation and maintenance of measures
whereby children of the privileged display test results, on average,
consistently higher than those children under the privileged on tests that were
devised to show as much. By using
measures stamped with the seal of science, then, high test scorers are
guaranteed seemingly-legitimized access to the a legacy of privilege that
accompanies higher performance, thus reproducing social and economic dominance
by descendants of the middle class elites who first established their dominion
in the Colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries. Some who read this will surely doubt such a
claim, but we hope that by the time readers finish the book, this contention
will be an indisputable, though unacceptable, fact. For those less skeptical now, we hope this
book will provide a deeper understanding as to how the mismeasure of children
became standard pedagogical practice.
Zealots for the
Elimination of the Unfit
Developing from within a long tradition
of social Darwinism, whereby those who are fittest are destined to rise to the
top, intelligence tests and achievement tests simply confirmed what was
commonly believed: those who occupy the
top rungs, or the bottom rungs, of the societal ladder are there because the
natural order has ordained it. And,
thus, modern science provided the privileged with a scientific rationale and a
moral balm of justification during an during the late 19th and early
20th Centuries, an era of extreme and growing income inequality,
exploitative factory life among urban slums, economic upheaval, economic
depression that lasted from 1893 to 1898, and new waves of Jewish, Slav, and
Italian immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. Essentially, the business, religious, and
social elites of the Gilded Age found a justification in a new science of
eugenics that solidified and quantified the exuberant biological and social
determinism expressed by 19th Century economist, Herbert Spencer,
who argued throughout the last half of the 19th Century that Laws of
Nature, no less, have ordained the “survival of the fittest” in all spheres of
life, from biology to economics. Unlike
Darwin, however, whose views acknowledged many more species extinctions than
successfully-adaptive ones, Spencer molded his philosophy to fit the unfailing
optimism of laissez-faire capitalism.
Importantly, Spencer’s philosophy of perpetual progress offered comfort
to people like Andrew Carnegie by providing a “philosophical justification for
Carnegie's unabashed pursuit of personal riches in the world of business,
freeing him from the moral reservations about financial acquisition that he had
inherited from his egalitarian Scottish relatives” (PBS/WGBH, 1999, para 2).
Carnegie, an avid reader, was once asked which author he would take to a desert
island if he could have only one. Carnegie didn’t hesitate: Herbert Spencer
would be his choice (para 1).
The social efficiency education
reformers who rose to prominence just after Herbert Spencer’s death in 1903
inherited from social Darwinism the unwavering belief in increasing
“differentiation” at every level of existence, from the physical to the social
sphere, from the evolution of the physical and biological worlds, even down to
the proliferation and classification of social and work roles. Spencer saw a pattern of differentiation
everywhere he looked, which was for him a sign of progress. Human-assisted differentiation was, or
Spencer, what Man could do to help Nature along toward that destination: “From
the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of
civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the
heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists” (Halsall, 1997,
para 3).
In 1857, Spencer (Halsall, 1997) detailed
a number of examples of “differentiation at work,” from the political to the
religious, but the sorting and segregating of worker classes is the form of
differentiation that the social and economic efficiency reformers of the early
20th Century seized upon:
Simultaneously there has been going on a second
differentiation of a still more familiar kind; that, namely, by which the mass
of the community has become segregated into distinct classes and orders of
workers. While the governing part has been undergoing . . . [its own] complex
development. . . , the governed part has been undergoing an equally complex
development, which has resulted in that minute division of labour
characterizing advanced nations (para 6).
By the 20th century, then,
industrialists and philanthropists inspired by Spencer’s hierarchical social
philosophy, turned Spencerian science toward a scientific approach to dividing
labor, a turn that was accompanied by the maturing needs of America’s
industrial economic engine and the mass production of goods. Taylor’s (1911) Principles of Scientific Management was unerringly based on the
principles of analyzing and dividing job tasks into their most differentiated
and efficient components so that that simplified job assignments could be
accomplished by interchangeable workers with minimal training whenever
possible. Increased efficiency and
industrial production demanded, in fact, the elimination of skilled artisans
who made products from start to finish and who could demand higher pay for
their services as a result. The emerging
national economy of industrial scale would not allow for such pastoral excesses
or the kind of differentiation based on skilled trades. Each trade, in fact, required analysis and
further dividing of labor, if differentiation and progress were to be fully
engaged.
By 1920, the social efficiency-social
control ideology based on differentiation through scientific management
provided a central rationale for the “progressive” use of intelligence tests
and achievement tests to measure, sort, and segregate school children in ways
that upheld social structures based on class and race prejudices. Social
efficiency based on racial and socioeconomic differentiation became defined and
advanced by scientific educationists, researchers, and psychologists, many of
whom were eugenics enthusiasts and who constituted a small group of the most
influential social and education reformers of the early 20th century.
They included luminaries like John Franklin Bobbitt, Elwood P. Cubberley, G.
Stanley Hall, Edward Thorndike, Lewis Terman, Robert Yerkes, and Robert
Goddard. Their work provided a rationale
for the new scientific schooling set forth in books like Bobbitt’s (1918) The Curriculum, Terman’s The Measurement of Intelligence (1916), and Thorndike’s The Principles of Teaching (1906).
Thorndike, who set for himself the immodest task of “conquering the new
world of pedagogy” (Lagemann quoting Thorndike, 2000, p. 58), viewed the job of
teachers, three quarters of whom were women in 1906 (p. 8), as carrying out the
tasks as determined by the “higher authorities” of male administrators and
psychologists such as himself, who were to be engaged in “decid[ing] what the
schools shall try to achieve and to arrange plans for school work which will
attain the desired ends” (p. 60).
Those “desired ends” would be the
presented to children by a subordinated teacher corps and measured by
standardized achievement tests, developed by a growing army of psychologists
following Thorndike’s lead. Subsequent
to the massive evaluation survey of New York City public schools in 1911 and
1912, researchers viewed the use of “scientific tests” to evaluate achievement
as a necessary component of evaluation research. These standardized achievement tests were
developed for most every subject, from reading to handwriting to Latin grammar:
The proliferation of achievement test was phenomenal:
between 1917 and 1928, some 1,300 achievement tests were developed in the
United States; by 1940, there were 2,600.
The massive growth of these tests was fueled by the simultaneous
development of “intelligence” tests (Lagemann, 2000, p. 88).
What a
Difference 25 Years Makes
To get an idea of the effects of the new
scientific efficiency movement during the early 20th Century,
particularly on curriculum and assessment, it is instructive to look at how
curriculum priorities changed between 1893 and 1918. The earlier date marks the approval by the
blue ribbon Committee of Ten’s rather modest set of elective tracks of high
school study, distinguished mainly by the amount of classical and modern
languages required to fill out a list of subjects based within the liberal arts
tradition. Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, who chaired the Committee of
Ten, was insistent than either of the four track could ready high school
students for a happy life, whether a high school diploma was the final
educational destination or if college were to
follow:
. . . the right selection of subjects,
along with the right way of teaching them,
could develop citizens of all
classes endowed in accordance with the
humanist ideal—with the power of reason, sensitivity to beauty, and high moral character” Kliebard, 2004,
p. 10.)
Twenty-five years later in 1918, another
elite commission charged with the same mission and under the same NEA
sponsorship came up with a radically different set of curriculum priorities
that replaced the focus on traditional liberal arts curriculum subjects with a
steadfast focus on preparing students for differentiated life roles that would
be predicated by their learning capacity as measured by intelligence and
achievement tests. In two and half
decades, the Committee of Ten’s humanistic ideal for high school graduates to
enter the world with “the power of reason, sensitivity to beauty, and high
moral character” (Kliebard, 2004, p. 10) was replaced by seven “cardinal principles”
that reflected the growing influence of social engineers who viewed school as
the primary tool to achieve efficient social steering and control. This new class of progressive technocrats
were armed with statistical methods inspired to measure and quantify, predict
and control every aspect of economic and social life. They shared in the visionary prognostications
of their leader, Thorndike, who believed that a new educational psychology,
properly aimed, “would tell the effect of every possible stimulus and the cause
of every possible response in every possible human being” (Lagemann quoting
Thorndike, 2001, p. 60). In turn, every aspect of school was to be molded to
serve a new social order as defined by a grandiose faith in science and
schooling and a devotion to the highly-contagious quackery of eugenics.
Entitled Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (U. S. Office of
Education, 1918), the first lines of the report by the Commission on the
Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE) makes the mission clear: “Secondary education should be determined by
the needs of the society to be served, the character of the individuals to be
educated, and the knowledge of educational theory and practice available” (p.
1). The “needs of the society” were
determined by researchers conducting, among large and small school systems
alike, extensive evaluation surveys and learning inventories of every sort in
what Harold Rugg (1975) referred to as “an orgy of tabulation” (p. 298). The result was a list of priorities for the
secondary curriculum that mentioned no specific school subject, classical or
otherwise:
·
Health
·
Command of fundamental processes
·
Worthy home membership
·
Vocation
·
Civic education
·
Worthy use of leisure
·
Ethical character
Just a few sentences into the
Introduction of the Report by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary
Education (Cardinal Principles), the authors, most of whom were professors in
the new university departments of educational administration, noted the
rationale for this tectonic curricular shift toward social utility: “the
character of the secondary-school population has been modified by the entrance
of large numbers of pupils of widely varying capacities, aptitudes, social heredity,
and destinies in life” (p. 2). Readers
today may wonder what role high school was to play if “destinies in life” had
been pre-determined prior to “entrance” to high school, but assumptions in 1918
about the role of school were quite different from the one espoused by Horace
Mann, who expressed the notion of the common school as the “great equalizer of
the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery” (Sigler, 1996,
p. 78). Such meritocratic idealism was not driving the Cardinal Principles, and
the “scientific” sorting of children by testing was unabashedly celebrated as a
progressive step toward an efficient society built with machine precision. In clearly discernible ways, the Cardinal
Principles reflected decades of increasing social anxiety among elites
regarding the threat to American bloodlines and social values from increasing
immigration and unbridled heterogeneity that grew, in large part, from the
unquenchable needs of the vast industrial melting pot born of scientific
management. The irony of attempting to
fix a social situation with the same tools that went into creating it was not
lost on John Dewey (1907), who believed that everyone who desired it, either
manager or worker, should have an education that left them equally prepared to
appreciate life fully:
Some are managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for
one as for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables
him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human
significance. How many of the employed are today mere appendages to the
machines which they operate! . . . . At present, the impulses which lie at the
basis of the industrial system are either practically neglected or positively
distorted during the
school period (pp. 38-39).
Although Dewey, George Counts, William
James, and Boyd Bode spoke and wrote against the presumptions underlying the
types of social sorting that were advocated by social efficiency and scientific
management reformers, testing experts, and eugenicists, Dewey and the social
democrats were fighting a rear guard action by 1918. Dewey’s pragmatic blend of philosophy,
experience, and the social sciences to improve democratic living did not fit
the tenor of the day. As Thorndike represented a growing army of behavioral
psychologists set about to “conquer the new world of pedagogy” (Lagemann, 2000,
p. 58), Thorndike had declared the same year that “whatever exists, exists in
some amount” (p. 57) whose quantity, as well as quality must be
determined. Lagemann rightfully
concludes that Thorndike’s focus on controlled experiment and quantification
(p. 58) signaled “a rise to prominence [that] made it unlikely that educational
scholarship [or educational practice] would develop along the lines Dewey had
advocated” (p. 57).
Even though the recommendations of the
1918 Commission advocated for comprehensive high schools that advanced civic
unification through a required general education courses electives open to all
students, as well as vocational specialization and career tracking, a
sociocultural hierarchy quickly emerged in the new comprehensive high school
(Wraga, 1998) that mirrored the underlying beliefs and thinly-disguised
intentions of the education efficiency experts who dominated the Cardinal
Principles :
Within the first
decade following the release of the report it was already apparent that the
specializing function would take precedence over the unifying function. This was evident in a marked emphasis on providing
for a variety of specialized course while doing little to unite students of
different backgrounds, abilities, and aspirations. Furthermore, when professional psychologists
looked to the schools for a new clientele for their group (or standardized)
testing practices developed during World War I, the result was a system of
tracking that divided students in ways inimical to the unifying intent of the
comprehensive model (p. 125).
With the sorting tools available to
separate the fittest from the less so, the beleaguered humanistic values that
were central in the 1893 Committee of Ten Report became the principal learning
domains of those middle class children with the test scores their worth in
pursuit of the liberal arts curriculum that served, then and now, as
pre-professional preparation. From that
point forward, access to schooling that advanced the “power of reason,
sensitivity to beauty, and high moral character” demanded a level of screening
that economic advantage largely palliated.
For the rest, there remained the other specializing functions of school
to help adjust students to their appropriate “destinies in life.” For Thorndike and those who followed his
lead, those “destinies in life” were believe to be determined by inherited
traits, so much so that “what anyone becomes by education depends on what he is
by nature” (Lagemann quoting Thorndike, p. 58).
The Dark Side of
Progress
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute
degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility,
society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.
The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover
cutting the Fallopian tubes. –U. S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
Buck
v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)
On January
11, 2012, the New York Times
(Severson, 2012) reported that a North Carolina state task force recommended a
financial settlement for the victims of the state’s involuntary sterilization
law (Serverson, 2011). Most of the 72
who remain alive are poor and disproportionately African American. Between 1929 and 1974, the state of North
Carolina, alone, sterilized an estimated 7,600 of its citizens who were deemed
feeble-minded, diseased, or otherwise defective by some trait thought to be
inheritable. In offering to pay $50,000
to each of the identified victims or victims’ families, North Carolina became
the first state to suggest financial compensation to victims of involuntary
sterilization from state Eugenics Boards that were once legal in 32 states and
that claimed over 60,000 victims nationwide between 1909 and 1974. Even with the settlement that many considered
an act of insult added to injury, North Carolina’s victims were sure to face
months and maybe years of further bureaucratic delays. In June, 2012, the most recent bill that
would have provided the modest settlements (Severson, 2012) for North Carolina
victims died in State Senate[ii]. In California, where over 20,000 people were
involuntarily sterilized, even such modest restitution is not on the horizon.
So that we
remember the lessons from America’s 20th century adventures in
eugenics, the discredited pseudoscience developed to justify containing,
segregating, and/or sterilizing individuals for the benefit of societal
improvement, there exists an extensive literature (Black, 2003; Rosen, 2004;
Selden, 1999; Kevles, 1998; Stern, 2005; Lombardo, 2011) dedicated to deepening
understanding of America’s role in providing the ideological and logistical
foundations for a form of social engineering that reached maturity on the most
hideous scale during the Holocaust. No
doubt families competing during the early years of the 20th Century
at county fairs across America in the “Fitter Family” and “Better Baby”
contests could ever guess that their blue ribbons or letter grades for eugenics
health could ever be prefigure the slaughter of millions deemed genetically
defective; the policies propagated by the Nazis leading up to the World War II,
however, were direct extensions of homegrown developments by American and
British eugenicists intent upon encouraging the breeding of successful
individuals of northern European ancestry (positive eugenics) and curtailing
the breeding of unfit populations identified as carriers of defective “germ
plasm” (negative eugenics).
The father
of the eugenics movement, Sir Francis Galton, coined the word, eugenics
(meaning “well born”) in the 1880s as the umbrella term for what he planned as
a new science that would demonstrate, firstly, that the British ruling class
came to its appropriate social status as the result of biological inheritance. The argument was an extension of social
Darwinism, which argued for a simplistic rendition of “survival of the fittest”
to be applied in the social sphere, asserting that those of greatest worth
should occupy the societal stations fitted to them by, well, their obvious
fitness. Such fitness, or lack thereof,
was thought to be passed to subsequent generations, for eugenicists followed,
as did Spencer before them, the Lamarckian understanding of evolution, whereby
acquired characteristics were thought to be inheritable through defective germ
plasm. Eugenicists, then, not only
advocated for strict immigration laws and universal intelligence testing to
block entry by those deemed defective, but they successfully lobbied for
mandatory sterilization as the most effective way to stem all sorts of human
problems of the poor and downtrodden that were believed to hasten “racial
decay.”[iii] As Assistant Director of the Carnegie-funded
Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor, Harry Laughlin (1922) published
a model eugenical sterilization law in 1922 that provided guidance to the states,
even though more than a dozen states already had laws on the books by
1920. By 1939, thirty-one states had
enacted eugenical sterilization laws.
Here is an excerpt from Laughlin’s model law:
AN ACT to prevent the procreation of persons socially
inadequate from defective inheritance, by authorizing' and providing for the
eugenical sterilization of certain potential parents carrying degenerate
hereditary qualities . . . . The socially inadequate classes, regardless of
etiology or prognosis, are the following: (1) Feeble-minded; (2) Insane, (including the psychopathic) : (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4)
Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug habitues); (6) Diseased (including the
tuberculous, the syphilitic, the leprous, and others with chronic, infectious
and legally segregable diseases); (7) Blind (including those with seriously
impaired vision) ; (8) Deaf
(including those with seriously impaired hearing); (9) Deformed (including the
crippled); and (10) Dependent (including orphans,
ne'er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers) (p. 369).
Though cloaked as science, eugenics
represented an ideological commitment to perfecting human pedigrees and eliminating
threats to that utopian end. It was
built around a set of scientific-sounding extrapolations from biology and
agriculture, and as Garland Allen (1986) quotes Galton, eugenics focused on
"the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair
the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally” (p.
225). Cutting and pasting from both
social Darwinism and Lamarckian theory regarding the inheritability of acquired
traits, eugenics was then placed into a statistical fortress that would shelter
the new “science,” with a public relations machine and research capacity paid
for with large philanthropic donations.
Such efforts could not have been sustained without early and ongoing
financial assistance from the Carnegie Institution and the Rockerfeller
Foundation, (Black, 2003) which helped to establish for eugenicist “a
gargantuan research establishment” (p. 219).
Much of the widespread appeal of eugenics reinforced a new secular faith
in science as advanced by cranks as well as the most respectable among
society’s elite, and it reinforced the bombastic belief in American
exceptionalism and the capacity for unceasing progress and increased
efficiency. Sadly, the broad appeal of
eugenics was buoyed, too, by great reservoirs of class bigotry, fear, unbridled
racism, and anti-democratic sentiments that were on the rise in the early years
of the 20th century, both here and abroad.
Since the
eugenics chapter of American social history is rarely taught in schools where
even the story of our slave-holding history remains controversial, most
Americans do not know that eugenics was taught as a regular part of science
curriculums in junior high and high schools, as well as at Princeton, Harvard,
Yale, University of Chicago, Stanford, and dozens of other American colleges
and universities (Black, 2003, p. 75).
In fact, Stanford’s first President, David S. Jordan, published a book
in 1902 entitled Blood of a nation
that was seminal in advancing the notion that attributes such as pauperism and
talent, industriousness and lassitude, are inheritable qualities.
With eugenics being propagated even by
many religious leaders during first decades of the last century (Rosen, 2004),
it is not surprising that the race and class assumptions that drove the
eugenics ideology and message found their way into cutting-edge education
reform in the new 20th Century, embracing as it did the efficient
ordering of society and the elimination of waste. Influential education professor and eugenicist,
J. Franklin Bobbitt, whose “scientific curriculum making” provided the model
for American school curriculum for almost fifty years, viewed social reformers’
plans of his day to assist the poor, or the unfit, as “civilization’s
retrogressive policies.” Black (2003) quotes Bobbitt as declaring that “schools
and charities supply crutches to the weak in mind and morals . . . [and]
corrupt the streams of heredity” (p. 29).
For Bobbitt and other social efficiency education reformers, initiatives
to educate and provide assistance to the poor got in the way of Nature’s
weeding process, which if allowed to operate freely in combination with
eugenical sterilization, would eliminate the defective “worm-eaten stock” (p.
29). By 1912, Bobbitt was a leader of the
new scientific curriculum standards and testing movement in education that
marked the ascendance of social efficiency experts, or the “zealot[s] for the
elimination of waste in the curriculum through the application of the kind of
scientific management techniques that, presumably, had been so successful in
industry” (Kliebard, 2004, p. 20).
Elwood P.
Cubberley was another important advocate of eugenics and the science of social
efficiency applied to education. As
Stanford professor, colleague and friend of Lewis Terman, and Dean of the
School of Education (1917-1933), Cubberley trained a generation of school
administrators and wrote textbooks on school administration and the history of
education that provided the standard interpretations for over thirty years. Cubberley’s (1922) A brief history of education provided the educational history for
teacher and administrator preparation programs for two decades, and in a
concluding chapter argued that advocates that the modern state’s “humanitarian
educational duties” (p. 451) demand that “defectives . . . be sent to a state
institution or be enrolled in a public-school class specialized for their
training” (p. 450). Cubberley’s main
attention, however, was aimed toward the “the education of superior children:”
One child of
superior intellectual capacity, educated as to utilize his talents, may confer
greater benefit to mankind, and be far more educationally important, than a
thousand of the feeble-minded children upon whom we have recently come to put
so much educational effort and expense (p. 451).
If any question remained in the minds of future educators
as to how “superior children would be identified, Cubberley immediately
followed with a clarion call for intelligence testing to provide the solution
to this and many other educational problems:
Questions
relating to the training of leaders for democracy’s service attain new
significance in terms of recent ability to measure and grade intelligence, as
also do questions relating to grading, classification in school, choice of
studies, rate of advancement, and the vocational guidance of children in
schools (p. 451).
Echoing
Cubberley’s unambiguous position was leading psychologist of the child study
movement, G. Stanley Hall (1904), who attacked the liberal arts curriculum of
schools in 1905 as unworkable because of the inherited defects of most
students, who constituted
. . . the great
army of incapables, shading down to those who should be in schools for dullards
or subnormal children, for whose mental development heredity decrees a slow
pace and early arrest, and for whom by general consent both studies and methods
must be different (p. 514).
Hall called for the weeding out of defectives and the
breeding of a better race to populate a utopian superstate (Karier, 1983) that
would be steered by psychologists like himself, for whom he created the term
“heartformers:”
If farmers who can breed cattle, sheep
and horses, can also learn how to breed good men and women, the problem is
solved. Germ plasm [genetic material] is
the most immortal thing in the physical world.
Backward it connects us by direct unbroken lines of continuity with our
remotest ancestor . . . and the most optimistic law in the world is that the
best survive and the worst perish (p. 55).
Just as the
eugenics message was clear in public lectures, college coursework, and teacher
preparation texts such as Cubberley’s, the new pseudoscience burrowed deeply,
too, into high school biology textbooks, as recounted in Selden’s (1999) Inheriting shame: The story of eugenics and
racism in America. Selden examined
six mainstream biology texts from 1914 to 1948. By using texts cited by Selden and others
recently made available online, we may, in fact, trace the public expressions
and beliefs of eugenics advocates during the first half of the 20th century. That this ideology found its way into school
books for the most widely-offered science course in high school helps us to
understand, perhaps, how sorting, testing, grouping, and segregation became an
accepted and expected component within the “basic grammar of schooling” (Tyack
& Cuban, 1995, p. 85).
Even though George W. Hunter is more
remembered as the author of the biology text used by John Scopes when he was
brought up on charges of teaching evolution in a Dayton, Tennessee high school,
Hunter should be remembered, too, for his significant role in spreading the
ideology of eugenics through his textbooks.
In the 1914 high school textbook, A
civic biology: Presented in problems, George W. Hunter defined eugenics as
“the science of being well born” (p. 261). And yet a few pages beyond this
rather mild definition, Hunter offered flawed interpretations on inherited
traits within two famous family case studies, the Jukes and the Kallikaks, to
fuel the conclusion that
Hundreds of
families such . . . as [the Jukes and
Kallikaks] exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts
of this country. The cost to society of
such families is very severe . . . . They not only do harm to others by
corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and
cared for by the state out of public money.
Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing
in return. They are true parasites.
The Remedy. – If such people were lower animals,
we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have
a remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways
preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and
degenerate race. Remedies of this sort
have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this
country (p. 263).
With the publication in 1922 of the
junior high science text, Civic Science
in the Community, the crisis that Hunter and co-author, Walter Whitman,
foresaw took on an added urgency, and his broadcasting of the problem became
more amplified. Using the same detailing
of the Jukes and the Kallikaks cases from previous texts, Hunter claimed the
problem was much more extensive than the “hundreds of families,” as he had
indicated in his 1914 text. By 1922,
Hunter and Whitman have lumped into their estimate all of America’s “200,000 feeble-minded persons” as part of
their earlier category of parasites:
If this [Jukes or Kallikaks] were but one case it would
be bad enough, but there are over 200,000 feeble-minded persons in the United
States to-day. These persons spread
disease, crime, and immorality in all parts of the country, principally because
they know no better. Just as certain
plants and animals become parasitic on others so these people have become
parasites on society. Largely for them the asylum and poorhouse exist (p.
419).
Hunter and Whitman go on to cite, specifically this time,
a European solution to the problem from the Italian village of Aosta, where
“idiotic folk known as cretins” were segregated during the previous century
into male and female asylums, thus preventing reproduction: “Since that time the race of cretins has
gradually died out and one rarely sees any of them now. This is the only means by which
feeble-mindedness can be eventually blotted out from the earth” (p. 419). Hunter and Whitman end their discussion of
eugenics in Civic Science in the
Community with a definition that reflects the grafting of eugenics
presumptions based on Mendelian inheritance onto the terminology of research by
early geneticist, Thomas Hunt Morgan, who had, in fact, scientifically
discredited the assumptions of eugenics regarding the mechanisms of genetic
inheritance. Somehow, Hunter does not
seem to have noticed that the science had taken a different fork in the road
from eugenics, or if he had, such new knowledge did not alter the authors’
renewed confidence that eugenics was an ascendant science:
The above
paragraphs show us that blood will tell or rather, to put it scientifically,
“that the chromosomes will tell the story.”
It is evident that if the race is to be improved, we must improve the
stock. This is to be done in the same
way that we would work on animals or plants, that is, we must check the
reproduction of the poorest strains and mate individuals of the strongest
stock. Eugenics [italics in the
original] is the science of improving the human race by better heredity” (p.
422).
By 1930, advances in genetic science and
the growing acceptance of environmental influences in shaping human
characteristics, had shifted thinking within the scientific community away from
the strict biological determinism argued by eugenicists. That did not stop school textbook writers,
however, from continuing to push the eugenics agenda, and by 1935, Hunter and
Whitman (1935) were at it again, this time with renewed vigor and enthusiasm
for the measures being taken to segregate and sterilize those deemed unfit to
reproduce, so that the defective and feeble-minded could, in Hunter and Whitman
parlance, be “blotted out from the earth:”
This can only be
done by segregation of such people into institutions and some means taken to
prevent their reproduction. Several
states and at least one country, Germany, have laws which allow such persons to
be sterilized or rendered incapable of reproduction” (p. 484).
Such language remains ominous almost eighty years later,
and the thought of it being taught in a high school biology class remains
shocking, especially since open and official hostility in Germany toward Jews
and other “unfit” groups was a matter of governmental policy and public record
when Hunter and Whitman were praising the Germans for their
foresightedness. In fact, a major
movement was afoot in the U. S. in 1935 to boycott the 1936 Olympics in
Berlin. These events, however, could not
dissuade these textbook writers and shapers of children’s values from their
self-appointed tasks. Two pages further
on, Hunter and Whitman add this warning:
If our country
is to keep its place as a leader in world progress, we must prevent its
overpopulation by defective or weak mental stock. We must, on the other hand, do all we can to
have persons of the better stock mate and have children (p. 486).
The authors end their chapter with a list of terms from
which students are to choose in order to fill in the blanks on the end of
chapter test. Here is the final item,
with proper answers supplied: “Laws should prevent the breeding
of the unfit, who would soon disappear from the earth” (p. 487). We may wonder if any young American boys
taking this test in 1935 were there when the gates of Buchenwald and Auschwitz
were opened in 1945 for the horrified young troopers to see to what “disappear
from the earth” looks like when efficiently applied on an industrial scale.
For those who know something about this
history of eugenics, there remains the common notion that the opening up of the
German concentration camps and the subsequent horrors unveiled in testimony at
Nuremburg served to stem homegrown enthusiasm for eugenic efforts to sort and
segregate the fit from the unfit. Selden (1999) shows this assumption to be a
myth, as does researcher, Ronald Ladouceur (2011), with examples from post-war
high school (and college) biology texts that make it clear that what survived
the Holocaust was what Selden (1999) calls a “reform eugenics” that dropped the
avowals to strict biological determinism, even as it maintained a loyalty to
social efficiency goals of social and vocational sorting. The reform eugenics textbook writers and
testing disciples continued to use schools as the primary institutional tool to
sort and segregate children, as well as the next generation of adults. In fact,
any “discussion of human possibilities” was to be based on a “commitment to a
hierarchical and corporate social order that placed students in social and
vocational slots based on fatally-flawed measures of ‘hereditary worth’” (p.
82).
Selden (1999) ends his analysis of
textbooks with Animal Biology (1948),
a high school text by Dr. Robert Guyer, noted biologist at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison. In important ways,
Guyer demonstrates how little eugenics advocates had actually changed since the
beginning of the 20th Century.
Almost forty years after the first wave of eugenic-inspired education
reform, Guyer (as cited in Selden, 1999, p. 81) claimed that “certain
hereditary types are more valuable to society and the race than others . .
.[and] in many family strains the seeds of derangement and disability have
become so firmly established that they menace the remainder of the population.”
Though the eugenics of mid-century ostensibly acknowledged the nurture side of
the nature-nurture debate, Guyer advised against public or private assistance
to the unfit, as he argued that “unwise charity . . . fosters the production of
unfit strains” (Selden, 1999, p. 82). It is as if Dr. Guyer was disinterring
arguments made by the new “scientists” of education, Bobbitt and Cubberley,
thirty years before.
We will turn now to examine more closely
where we have been and where we are going in regards to the overlapping and
mutually-reinforcing linkages among the rise of accountability and standards
movement, high stakes standardized testing, and the latest manifestations of
corporate education reform. We shall do so in a way that contextualizes these
elements within the recurrent cultural and political policy markers that lead some
to refer to our educational history metaphorically as a pendulum, or even a
vicious circle. Our metaphor, hopefully,
may be viewed as a spiral, for as Tyack and Cuban (1995) point out, the arrow
of time upon which social evolution is carried, makes it impossible to return
to exactly the same place, even if the ideas and motivations are drawn from
previous eras and even if they have not changed.
[i] Rice published Scientific Management in Education in 1913, just two years after
the publication of Taylor’s Principles of
Scientific Management, which brought the industrial revolution to full
fruition through assembly line mass production of goods. It is not a coincidence that schooling of
that era and subsequent eras has come to be known as the “factory system” of
education. See Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency
(1962) and Kliebard’s The Struggle for
the American Curriculum (2004) for detailed explications of the social
efficiency movement in education.
[ii] The prevailing rationale for rejection of payments
to sterilization victims was expressed by a North Carolina State Senator, Chris
Carney: “If we do something like this, you open up the
door to other things the state did in its history…. Some, I’m sure you’d agree,
are worse than this” (Severson, 2012, June 20).
[iii] This was a term used by UC Berkeley zoology professor,
Dr. Samuel Holmes, in a syllabus for one of his extension courses, “The Factors
in the Evolution of Man.” From the
syllabus: “Made aware of the biological trend of his development, man will have
it in his power to counteract, in a measure, the forces which are productive of
racial decay, and to set in operation agencies by which the heritage of the
race may be improved” (Retrieved from the Cold Springs Harbor website at http://www.dnalc.org/view/10238--The-factors-of-evolution-in-man-course-offered-by-Samuel-Holmes-at-University-of-California-Berkeley-1-.html)
Holmes remained a staunch eugenics
advocate after others in the scientific community came to see the errors of
their ways. In fact, in 1939 Holmes
published an essay in the prestigious journal, Science, in which he defended eugenics against what he viewed as
“ill-founded opposition” that eventually would be “melted away like fog before
the rays of the rising sun” (p. 357).
Near the end of his essay, he tried to allay the fears of eugenics
detractors with this admission, which underscored his shared commitment to a
social agenda embraced by the Nazis, who would be rolling through Poland five
months after Holmes’s essay appeared:
.
. . as eugenicists, we are committed to no particular social, religious,
political or economic creed, that we are no more concerned with the class war
than the botanist or the astronomer, that we are quite willing that Mary should
marry Jack or any one else provided their progeny will probably not be
imbeciles, lunatics or otherwise a burden to society (p. 357).
