Echoes of a forgotten past: Eugenics, testing, and education reform

Educational Forum, The, Winter 2002 by Stoskopf, Alan

The children of today must be viewed as the raw material of a new State; the school as teh nursery of the nation.

-Ernest Bryant Hoag and Lewis M. Terman (1914)

The metaphors employed by educational psychologist Lewis Terman formed part of a eugenic ideology that guided educational reform in the early 20th century. Echoes from this past can also be heard in today's calls for more high-stakes testing. An investigation of the role eugenics played in the history of testing is more than an arcane study of a forgotten chapter in U.S. education. It raises fundamental questions about where today's reform efforts are heading.

Sir Francis Galton, an English mathematician, invented eugenics. He conceived of it as an interdisciplinary field of scientific inquiry with a civic purpose. As Galton (1919, 1) wrote, "Eugenics is the study of the agencies under social control that seek to improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally." What Galton saw as a new branch of scientific inquiry would become a dogmatic prescription in the ranking and ordering of human worth. His ideas found their most receptive audience in the first decades of the 20th century in the United States.

When eugenics is mentioned in the history of education, it is usually as a footnote to the social-efficiency and scientific-- management movement in U.S. schooling. In fact, it was also a widely accepted theory of human differences that deeply influenced the thinking of such reformers as Terman, Henry Goddard, and Edward Thorndike. These three educational psychologists made important contributions in the construction and administration of standardized tests; they also were part of the mainstream thinking of their time, embracing unexamined beliefs about human potential. These beliefs would influence the direction of school reform then and create legacies for us to confront today.

Eugenic ideas would need the right social context to emerge and thrive. The United States at the turn of the century was experiencing large-scale immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the beginning of African-American migration from the Jim Crow South to Northern cities. Competition for jobs intensified existing frictions along class and racial lines. It was out of this cauldron of social upheaval that the U.S. eugenics movement began. For many native-born European Americans, these changes threatened their social status. Eugenic advocates articulated those fears through the language of academic research and social reform (Beckwith 1993).

However, eugenicists used a flawed and crude interpretation of Gregor Mendel's laws on heredity to argue that criminality, intelligence, and pauperism were passed down in families as simple dominant or recessive hereditary traits (Cravens 1988). Many eugenicists believed that some individuals and entire groups of people (such as Southern Europeans, Jews, Africans, and Latinos) were predisposed to carry a disproportionate number of defective traits in the general population. These ideas began to permeate different disciplines in higher education in the 191 Os, especially biology and psychology (Selden 1999). One of the first educational psychologists to become an ardent proponent of eugenics was Henry Goddard (1866-1957). His innovation was to infuse eugenics into educational theory and practice.

GODDARD: THE THREAT OF THE 'FEEBLEMINDED'

Goddard was the Director of the Vineland Training Center for Feebleminded Boys and Girls (in New Jersey) between 1906 and 1918. When he assumed leadership of the institution, Goddard was already interested in eugenics. It seemed to provide a scientific explanation for why some students were "slow learners."

Vineland served as a sort of holding center for children and adolescents who had been deemed "feebleminded." This term was a popular eugenic catch phrase for anyone thought to be mentally deficient. The feebleminded were considered hereditarily prone to crime, poverty, and a host of moral improprieties. For example, feebleminded girls were believed to be at risk for prostitution (Kevles 1995). The problem for Goddard and other eugenicists was the absence of an accurate device to identify the feebleminded. This changed with the IQ test.

Goddard had become familiar with the work of French psychologist Alfred Binet on school children in Paris, France. Binet had developed a series of protocols to assist teachers in identifying students who were not performing to grade level. Goddard saw Binet's work as a perfect tool for measuring the eugenic worth of an individual. Binet was not a eugenics advocate; he was much too uncertain about what intelligence was and believed that a person could adapt and intellectually grow over time (could 1996). Goddard discounted Binet's reservations. To him, intelligence was fixed and finite. Goddard thought a score on a standardized test would be the best predictor for what a person was capable of doing in life.

Goddard translated Binet's test into English and decided to use it. He first experimented with it on inmates at the Vineland Center, but he wanted a larger sample to demonstrate its wider applicability. Ellis Island provided the solution. Between 1912 and 1913, Goddard and his field workers, in conjunction with the Public Health Service, administered the first version of a standardized IQ test to a large population in the United States (Kraut 1994). The results of his study on immigrants produced headlines in academic journals and the popular press. According to Goddard's (1917, 252) findings, "83% of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 87% of Russians, and 79% of the Italians tested below the 12 year old limit and were therefore feebleminded." Goddard (1917, 266) went on to say, "Not only are these figures representative of these ethnic groups as a whole they are probably too small." It was an indication of the racial and class attitudes of the time that these claims were well received among many in the general public and the academy.