ABSTRACT
The concern of a considerable number of politically motivated sociologists was focused upon the extent to which the equality of opportunity and the "parity of prestige" among the different kinds of secondary schools, which were proposed in the newly instituted "secondary education for all," was actually achieved. All children should have the opportunity for education and training to the level and in the directions warranted by their abilities and talents. Equality of opportunity in education, besides being ethically just, was therefore also a practical necessity for the achievement of this social end. The separate caricatures, then, of the Environmentalist and the Hereditarian positions alike, and the additional caricature of their supposedly diametrical opposition to each other, simply had no basis. The chapter demonstrates beyond any doubt whatever that it is a complete fallacy to suppose that Burt and the sociologists of education were ranged on opposite sides on the central issue of heredity, environment, and intelligence.
