11-12-07, 9:41 am
Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education By Clyde Chitty Continuum International Publishing Group
The recent racist rantings of the Nobel prize-winning geneticist Dr. James Watson shows us again how the eugenicist myths of inherited intelligence are still common currency and how immediate and contemporary ripostes to such bogus science are necessary and essential.
How vital and timely, then, is the publication of Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education by Clyde Chitty, who is the professor of education at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
The most important qualities of Chitty's short book are that it is accurate, lucid, very readable and academic without any academicism, which is precisely how such a subject should be undertaken.
It is a topic of the utmost importance to educationalists, of course, but also to all parents and children of all nations, as it exposes that 'a lingering belief in genetic determinism in the area of human ability has meant a failure to take on board the liberating concept of human educability.'
Chitty begins by showing how the fear of an educated working class stoked the Establishment's reluctance to offer them little more than a rudimentary education and how, in the late 19th century, Darwin's second cousin Francis Galton sought to poison his cousin's insights by perverting them towards eugenics – the study of maintaining and improving 'innate' intelligence by selective breeding.
He reminds us how such ideas were adopted and championed by esteemed writers from HG Wells, TS Eliot and DH Lawrence to Aldous Huxley and WB Yeats, as well as pioneering family-planning advocates such as Marie Stopes.
He has significant chapters on the power that eugenicists such as Sir Cyril Burt had within both public policy and ordinary life and the institutionalizing of intelligence quotient (IQ) and 'intelligence tests' as the major scorer of the 11-plus examination, which pointed four out of five 11-year-olds to secondary modern schools while giving the other 20 per cent the powerful advantages of a grammar school education.
He also explains how twisted 'psychometrists' such as Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen identified lower 'inborn' intelligence with black and working-class children, thus creating the line of pseudo-science directly from Galton, through the nazi eugenicists, to contemporary racist advocates such as Watson.
But Chitty also explains how true educationalists, such as Brian Jackson, Brian Simon and Caroline Benn, alongside thousands of working teachers, rejected and refuted these ideas, which were taken up perniciously by Tory politicians such as Sir Keith Joseph and continued by new Labour in their emphasis on 'gifted' children.
How the eugenicists would have loved the so-called 'centers of excellence' and the new 'National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth.'
He adds that the struggle against 'the fallacy of fixed ability' and notions of inherited intelligence must continue, allied with the campaigns for comprehensive schools.
But what Chitty achieves most effectively is to harness his history to the lives of ordinary people. In 1955, I failed the 11-plus and then a resit, largely because I couldn't fathom the part of the exam which gave most marks – the IQ tests.
I went to a local secondary modern, full of working-class children with tremendous intellectual abilities and brainpower, some deeply committed and talented teachers but with minimal resources, smelly outside toilets, a tiny playing field at the back of a builders' yard and a school library consisting of three short shelves in a corner cupboard.
'You aren't brainy enough to go to grammar,' we were told uncountable times. Eugenics in a nutshell, spelled out to millions over many generations.
All this came back to me as I read Chitty's epochal book, reminding me to ring up the publishers and tell them to get this book out as an accessible paperback ASAP. It has a critical role to play in today's debates and needs to be read and considered by millions.
From Morning Star
