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The Social Movements of the 20th Century |
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| Fall 1999, v15-4 | ||||||
| The eugenics movement
was founded at the turn of the century by Francis Galton, British scientist and cousin
to Charles Darwin. Based on the notion that human characteristics were unequally
distributed across populations, it proposed that the physical, moral, and intellectual
qualities of the human race be improved through planned breeding. The movement became
popular in the U.S. and Canada, and led to compulsory limits on the breeding of mental
"misfits," paupers, and criminals. It also led to negative stereotyping
of Irish and Eastern Europeans as "inferior." The IQ and testing movement was founded by the French psychologist Alfred Binet at the turn of the century. Binet developed testing techniques designed to distinguish between retarded and normal children, in order to segregate out the former for special instruction. His work was picked up by U.S. hereditarians, who fostered the notion that intelligence is an inherited mental property, unevenly distributed among humans, according to a strict statistical pattern. This pattern came to be known as the curve of normal distribution, or the "bell curve." Accordingly, people were divided across a continuum from the mentally retarded (approximately two percent of the population) to very superior (approximately percent). The middle represents those of average intelligence (approximately 50 percent of the population).* Based on the growing belief that the American school system should be dedicated to the improvement of human capital as a means for economic growth, the vocational education movement promoted the view that schools should be organized on the model of factories--i.e., students should be separated on the basis of intellectual and "vocational" capacity. Lower-rated students would learn the skills necessary to become artisans and laborers, while higher-rated were trained to become managers and leaders. This led to the establishment of the "comprehensive high school," which was initially designed to provide different curricula to students based on innate abilities. This movement was positively influenced by Frederick W. Taylor--the father of scientific management.  |
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