Charles Murray, KIPP, and the Second Coming of Eugenics
A similar version of this commentary was published by Substance News earlier today:
The old-school eugenics of the previous century was aimed to eradicate all sorts of unfit and anti-social behavior, from theft to laziness to wandering to sexual deviance. The source of these problems was thought to be a biological defect in the genes, or germ plasm, as that mysteriously-determinative substance was known a hundred years ago.
With the rise of behaviorism and the eventual scientific acceptance of what common sense has always told us about the importance of environment in shaping organisms, genetic determinism finally gave way, even if biology textbook writers continued to imprint the eugenics dogma in school books well into the 1950s. And even as the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994 signaled a final assault by the last eugenicist hold-outs defending the
The old-school eugenics of the previous century was aimed to eradicate all sorts of unfit and anti-social behavior, from theft to laziness to wandering to sexual deviance. The source of these problems was thought to be a biological defect in the genes, or germ plasm, as that mysteriously-determinative substance was known a hundred years ago.
With the rise of behaviorism and the eventual scientific acceptance of what common sense has always told us about the importance of environment in shaping organisms, genetic determinism finally gave way, even if biology textbook writers continued to imprint the eugenics dogma in school books well into the 1950s. And even as the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994 signaled a final assault by the last eugenicist hold-outs defending the
