Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for educationHollingworth, Leta Stetter
Science
Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for education
Hollingworth, Leta Stetter
Educational psychology; Educational tests and measurements; Exceptional children
In the older social orders, where education was or is caste-bound, it is
highly probable that on the whole education was and is more fairly
adapted to individual differences than it is with us. Those barbarians
who had much capacity for abstract thinking achieved by trial and
success high-caste status, of which they ultimately became conscious.
The aristocracy of older countries was not established by forces outside
of human nature. The nobles were in the first place those who rose to
power because they were stronger, more enduring, and more capable of
thinking than average men. Caste grew out of human nature itself. The
majority of the nobles’ children were capable by heredity of abstract
thinking, and of acquiring the education, which came finally through
centuries to be provided for them. The majority of those who failed to
achieve high-caste status before it became recognized as such were
doubtless chiefly individuals who produced descendants, on the average
ill adapted to profit from the kind of education established for the
children of the higher castes.
In Great Britain, for example, where social organization was and is
frankly based in theory and practice on caste (upper-caste status being,
however, constantly kept open to adults of unusual achievement), Burt
found that boys of upper-caste family, attending an exclusive high-class
school, surpassed in all respects, in mental tests, sons of middle-class
parents, of equal age, attending common schools. It is necessary, though
outrageous to our prejudices, to face the fact that, in our own country
(where caste is despised in theory and to some extent in practice), the
median capacity of pupils in expensive private schools is well above the
average of the juvenile population at large.
Caste-bound education in older civilizations recognizes innate
individual differences to a considerable extent. Its injustice is that
it does not recognize them completely. Caste takes account of individual
differences due to heredity, but it does not regard those due to
variation. Caste neglects to provide for the overlapping which occurs
among the children of parents of different achievement levels. In a
society founded formally on caste, there is no way provided for the
appropriate education of gifted variants who occur in the lower castes,
and for those of inferior ability born into the higher castes.
Artificial barriers to natural achievement have arisen, because the
consciousness of superior status was accompanied by jealousy of it as
well. Revolt against this injustice to the minority (not recognized,
however, as minority by the rebels) led to the opposite injustice, which
we see practiced in the schools of our own democracy.
In the United States the theory was adopted that all men are created
equal. All children must, therefore, be required to take the same
education. Such a system violates individuality even more painfully and
wastefully than the despised caste system of the older countries does.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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