Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Disadvantage: The Genetic Case 57‘betterment’, can be clearly seen as central factors in that muscularChristian zeal that maintained an empire and created the new transatlanticcolossus.Galton had strong Quaker roots, as did his biographer and acolyte,Pearson. In America, Henry Goddard (1912) the author of the famousinvestigation into the feeble-minded Kallikak family was a Quaker, andLewis Terman had a puritan background. Cyril Burt, the educationalresearcher associated with the Butler Education Act of 1944, and theresulting ‘eleven-plus’ examination, was of Congregationalist stock. Hewas also a great admirer of Galton, and White (2006b) reminds us thatBurt’s father held him (Galton) to be, along with Milton and Darwin, theepitome of the ‘ideal man’. (Indeed, as Crook [2007] notes in his work onsocial Darwinism, there are many interesting connections between theDarwinian inheritance and the eugenics movement.) It is quite clear thatthe younger Burt shared this view. He was, more directly, a member ofthe Eugenics Society that Galton had established in 1908. All of this has aparticular poignancy because of the revelations that Burt falsified someof his statistical data; see Edwards (1989). Like other puritan denominations,the Congregationalist offshoot of Calvinism was strongly motivatedand ambitious, but somewhat restricted in its notions of charity:‘like the Quakers [they tended] to look after their own poor, while beingindifferent to poverty in general, seeing it as part of the providentialplan’ (White, 2005: 431432). This surely has obvious links with a geneticdeterminism where intelligence is concerned. Another luminary, WilliamMcDougall an early social psychologist and interpreter of the ‘groupmind’ that was so much a preoccupation at the turn of the (20th) century,and a eugenicist was from the Dissenting background, which broadlyincludes Congregationalists and Quakers. A central and common tenetwas a devotion to knowledge and, more specifically, to the idea that thematerial success to which knowledge could lead was a mark of divineapprobation.There were many others of similar description. White notes thatlinkages between puritanism and intelligence testing are not apparent inall cases, and he admits that there is generally no ‘conclusive’ evidencethat dissenting beliefs influenced educational research. Indeed, some ofthe observations made by Alfred Binet whose name became synonymouswith intelligence testing suggest that he may be one of theexceptions. In 1909, he wrote that those who believed intelligence to bean inherited and unalterable quantity demonstrated both a ‘brutalpessimism’ and scientific inaccuracy; see also Clarke and Clarke (2006).Nonetheless, while there will obviously be exceptions, and while White’s