Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    390/534 (page 374)
    374 WILLIAM MCDOUGALL can be no doubt, I suppose, that the ilHterates among the recruits repre¬ sented socially and economically lower strata of the population than the literates. The army mental testing has thus provided evidence that the lower social strata in this country possess less native intelligence than the average citizen; though they leave the extent of this inferiority very un¬ certain. Two researches carried out under my direction at Oxford were, I believe, the first to attack this problem directly. Both involved the direct comparison in respect of intellectual capacity of two groups of boys, the boys of the one group (A) being of the best professional class in the main, those of the other group (B) being drawn from the lower middle and artisan classes. In the first research (conducted by Mr. C. Burt as long ago as the year 1908) the comparison was a side issue of the main research, but it indicated a considerable superiority of the boys of group A. Mr. H. B. English carried out in the years 1913-14 a research specially planned with great care to make a comparative estimate of the intellectual capacities of two similar groups of boys. The results entirely confirmed those obtained incidentally by Mr. Burt. The boys of group A showed intellectual capacity of a distinctly higher level than that shown by group B. The possibilities of attributing this superiority to better education or other environmental influences was after careful consideration rejected. The superiority found seems to be attributable only or in the main to superior inheritance. A third research directed to the same problem was reported in this country in 1918 by Mr. A. W. Kornhauser.^ He investigated the proportion of children advanced and of those retarded in school, as compared with the position in school of the average child of the same age. The total number of children reviewed was 1000, drawn from five schools of the city of Pittsburgh. The schools fell into three classes according to the average economic standing of the parents. The schools of the middle standing were found to contain about 30 per cent of retarded and 20 per cent of advanced children. The schools of lowest standing showed about 40 per cent of retarded and 7.5 per cent of advanced children. The school of highest standing showed nearly 13 per cent of retarded and nearly 25 per cent of advanced children. Mr. Kornhauser adduces considerations tending to show that this result is unduly favorable to the schools of lower standing, that if the necessary corrections could be made the difíerence between the groups would be larger than those actually shown. The result was confirmed by a further statistical investigation in which all the 2 The economic standing of parents and the intelligence of their children. Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. ix.