gat

through that system disseminated to administrators, teachers, counselors, collegians, and the
national consciousness.
As Germany became the intellectuals’ darling of the moment at the end of the nineteenth century,
a long-dead German philosopher, Kant’s successor at the University of Berlin, Johann Herbart,
enjoyed a vogue in school-intoxicated America. "Herbartianism" is probably the first of a long line
of pseudoscientific enthusiasms to sweep the halls of pedagogy. A good German, Herbart laid out
with precision the famous Herbartian Five-Step Program, not a dance but a psychologized teacher
training program. By 1895, there was a National Herbartian Society to spread the good news,
enrolling the likes of Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia and John Dewey. Herbart was finally
laid to rest sometime before WWI when Dewey’s interest cooled, but his passage was a harbinger
of many Herbart-oid enthusiasms to follow as a regular procession of educational gurus rose and
fell with the fashion of the moment. The Moorish dance of scientific pedagogy accelerated its
tempo relentlessly, and arms, legs, heads, perspiration, cries of venereal delight, and some
anguish, too, mingled in the hypnotic whirl of laboratory dervishes. By 1910, Dewey was
substituting his own five steps for Herbart’s in a book called How We Think. Few who read it
noticed that a case was being made that we don’t actually think at all. Thinking was only an
elusive kind of problem-solving behavior, called into being by dedicated activity; otherwise we are
mindless.
12 America’s academic romance with scientific racism, which led directly to mass sterilization experiments in this
country, has been widely studied in Europe but is still little known even among the college-trained population here.
An entire study can be made of the penetration of this notion—that the makeup of the species is and ought to be
controllable by an elite—into every aspect of American school where it remains to this day. I would urge any reader
with time and inclination to explore this matter to get Daniel J. Kevles’ In The Name of Eugenics where a thorough
account and a thorough source bibliography are set down. This essay offers a disturbing discussion which should
open your eyes to how ideas flow through modern society and inevitably are translated into schooling. Dr. Kevles is
on the history faculty at California Institute of Technology.
Oddly enough, on December 11, 1998, the New York Times front page carried news that an organization in Cold
Spring Harbor, Long Island, had deciphered the full genetic code of a microscopic round worm, a landmark
achievement. The president of the National Academy of Sciences is quoted as saying, "In the last 10 years we have
come to realize humans are more like worms than we ever imagined." Whether the Cold Spring Harbor facility
which announced this has any connection with the former racial science station, I do not know.
What Is Sanity?
What we today call the science of child development grew out of the ambition of G. Stanley Hall,
Wundt’s first assistant at Leipzig, Dewey’s mentor at Hopkins, and a man with a titanic ego. Hall
inserted the word "adolescence" into the American vocabulary in 1904. If you wonder what
happened to this class before they were so labeled, you can reflect on the experience of
Washington, Franklin, Farragut, and Carnegie, who couldn’t spare the time to be children any
longer than necessary. Hall, a fantastic pitchman, laid the groundwork for a host of special
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