Mental differences in certain immigrant groups : psychological tests of south Europeans in typical California schools with bearing on the educational policy and on the problems of racial contacts in this country / by Kimball Young.
- Kimball Young
- Date:
- [1922]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Mental differences in certain immigrant groups : psychological tests of south Europeans in typical California schools with bearing on the educational policy and on the problems of racial contacts in this country / by Kimball Young. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![A 1 I»' 1 i) Zl } MENTAL DIFFERENCES IN CERTAIN IMMIGRANT GROUPS — CHAPTER I. PLAN AND PURPOSE OP THIS STUDY The so-called “New Immigration” which has deluged this country in the past thirty or forty years has resulted in many problems—social, economic, racial and educational. Only lately has serious attention been paid to the last two: in reference to the first the consequences of racial mixture of the older and newer stocks, and in regard to the second, the problem of providing the children of foreign stock and adult immigrants with an education commensurate with modern needs and along the lines laid down in our national culture. The educational difficulties have been reflected in great retardation and in great burden of teaching the foreign children the content of our curricula. The incentive to this study grew out of an attempt to discover if possible some of the causes of the difficulty in the education of children of South European ancestry in our public schools and further to see if a study of these children of immigrants might not throw some light on the larger question of adult immigration. The purposes of this research are: (1) To investigate by psycho logical tests and other measures the mental capacity of the South Italian, Portuguese and Spanish-Mexican children in certain pub lic schools, to discover whether their inability to master the tradi tional American education is due: (a) to their alleged language handicap, or (b) to the lack of native mental endowment (as com pared to that of “American” children of North European an cestry) which prevents their acquisition of the content of our curricula. (2) From the results of the study of the school popu lation to note the possible implication of the findings for the larger problem of immigration and the future race mixture in this country. 1 The results will be treated in a comparative way in order to 1 Race will be used in this monograph in the semi-popular sense. Cf. Reuter (89) and Retzius (88). Technically in speaking of Europeans we should employ the term sub-race.” Race” as used here has a common sanction in much sociological and psychological writing. The term “American” will be used to refer to the children of North European ancestry. “Latin” will be used when speaking of the South Italians, Portuguese and Spanish-Mexicans as a group. “Non-Latin” will occasionally be used to designate the children of North European background in contrast to the South Europeans and to avoid stereotyped expression. [3]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18026205_0006.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
