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Julian Nava
"It's been an enormous loss to our country. We'll never know how many Dr. Salks, or Pablo Cassals, or Picassos have been lost because children from minority groups were not inspired or challenged and given the chance to show what they've got."1
-- --Julian Nava, on the legacy of IQ testing of minority students (see SideNote)
On a Local Level
The influence that eugenicists had on education in the U.S. during the early decades of the twentieth century can be seen primarily at the local level. Teachers, superintendents, authors of textbooks, and school board members often supported eugenics theories and practices. Perhaps the most profound effect eugenicists had on education was in bringing standardized testing into the schools.
Identifying Levels of Intelligence
The IQ test was originally designed by Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, to identify students who were not achieving grade level so that teachers might offer them extra help. Binet passionately believed in children's "capacity to learn, to improve with instruction"2. In 1910, he wrote; "some recent philosophers appear to have given their moral support to the deplorable verdict that the intelligence of a child is a fixed quantity....We must protect and act against this brutal pessimism."3 Unfortunately, some educators who were involved in the eugenics movement in the United States, such as Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman and Edward Thorndike used the IQ test to identify and score levels of intelligence, with the "pessimistic" assumption that intelligence is a "fixed quantity" that will not change over time. These eugenicists were especially interested in getting the test into public schools. The army tests of 1917 would provide the data and means needed to bring the test into U.S. schools on a mass level.
(For more information on the history of the IQ test, go to "Take the Test," in this section.)
Reaching the Masses
Goddard, Terman, Thorndike, and other eugenic thinkers worked together to create the army tests of 1917. They created scoreable tests that could be administered to many people at the same time. This large-scale experiment, conducted on 1.7 million army recruits, successfully demonstrated a low cost, quick method for classifying people's levels of intelligences. Over the next few years, eugenicists would turn their sights on school systems. And, in fact, by 1930, there were 130 different standardized tests used to classify the fast growing student population in American schools4.
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Julian Nava
Julian Nava, a Mexican American, grew up in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 30s. His parents stressed to Julian and his brothers the importance of getting a good education. Julian's mother had been a schoolteacher in Mexico and his father, a barber, encouraged his children to read and study. The Navas spoke only Spanish at home.
Like all schoolchildren in Los Angeles in the 1930s, Julian Nava was given an IQ test as a young boy. These tests would largely determine a student's course of study, not simply during the elementary years, but throughout his or her entire public school education. Historian Gilbert Gonzalez talks about the challenge that Julian, and others like him, faced: "It must have been a heavy burden for children entering kindergarten or the first grade to be given the test, possibly in a language they didn't understand. This test would become a mark that they would have to carry for the rest of their lives."6
By the 1930s, two thirds of Mexican American students in Los Angeles were classified as slow learners and even mentally retarded on the basis of IQ tests given as early as kindergarten. Julian Nava was tracked into vocational courses such as auto mechanics and carpentry and steered away from the college preparatory track. Julian's older brother, Henry, a soldier in WWII, had seen how the less educated soldiers were the first to fall on the front lines. Determined not to let that happen to his younger brother, Henry accompanied Julian to school and demanded of administrators that Julian be placed in college prep courses. And, Henry demanded of his little brother that Julian pass them!
Julian Nava graduated high school in 1945 and went on to earn a doctorate in history from Harvard. He was later elected to the Los Angeles board of education, where in the 1960s and 70s he led a successful battle to ban IQ testing in the Los Angeles schools. In 1979, he was named U.S. ambassador to Mexico by president Jimmy Carter.
Julian was lucky to have a champion in his older brother. Unfortunately, many of Julian's peers were not as lucky; so many of them were denied educational opportunities.
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Facing History Resources
• Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 2002, Chapter 4, "Eugenics and the 'Will to Believe.'"
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Print and Video Resources
• A Study in American Intelligence by Carl Brigham (Princeton University Press, Princeton) 1923
• Schools As Sorters : Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology and the Intelligence Testing Movement, 1890-1930 by Paul Davis Chapman (New York University Press, New York) 1988.
• The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism by A. Chase (Alfred A. Knopf, New York) 1976.
• The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 2nd Edition by H. Cravens (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore) 1988.
• The Mismeasure of Man, 2nd Edition by Stephen Jay Gould (W.W. Norton & Company, New York) 1996.
• As American as Public School: 1900-1950 from "School: The Story of American Public Education" (Video: 55 minutes. Films for the Humanities & Sciences) 1994. http://www.pbs.org/kcet/publicschool/
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Web Resources
• Cold Spring Harbor: American Eugenics Image Archive
• History of Influences in the Development of Intelligence Theory and Testing, Indiana University
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1 As American as Public School: 1900-1950 from "School: The Story of American Public Education" (Video: 55 minutes. Films for the Humanities & Sciences) 1994.
2 Les Idees modernes sur les enfants (1973 edition) by Alfred Binet (E. Flammarion, Paris) 1909.
3 Ibid, p. 101.
4 A Bibliography of Mental Tests and Rating Scales by G.A. Hildreth (Psychological Corporation, New York) 1933.
5 "Echoes of a Forgotten Past: Eugenics, Testing, and Education Reform" by Alan Stoskopf from...() Page 6.
6 As American as Public School: 1900-1950 from "School: The Story of American Public Education" (Video: 55 minutes. Films for the Humanities & Sciences) 1994.
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