ABSTRACT
Education and Heredity The character of an adult plant or animal results from the interaction of the environment and the organism from the moment of fertilisation onwards. I have tried to make this statement as colourless and uncontroversial as possible, because everything more definite is matter of controversy. The proportion of heredity and environment in forming an adult human character is very differently estimated by different authorities. Among men of science there is a natural tendency for heredity to be emphasised by geneticists, while environment is emphasised by psychologists. There is, however, another line of cleavage on this question, not scientific, but political. Conservatives and imperialists lay stress on heredity because they belong to the white race but are rather uneducated. Radicals lay stress on education because it is potentially democratic, and because it gives a reason for ignoring difference of colour. This political cleavage on the whole overrides that of geneticist and psychologist. Hogben, though a geneticist, finds little to be said in favour of eugenics, while governmental psychologists, such as Goddard and Terman, tend to emphasise heredity. Americans of this school always tacitly assume the superiority of the Nordics, though even the most conservative among them are constrained to admit that the mountaineers of North Carolina and Kentucky, who are of pure English and Scottish descent, none the less have, on the average, lower intelligence quotients than are found among Jewish immigrants.
