Читать книгу Applied Eugenics - Paul Popenoe - Страница 22
Fig. 8.—The graph shows that 10-year-old children in Connecticut (1903) are to be found in every grade, from the first to the eighth. The greatest number is in the fourth grade, and the number who are advanced is just about the same as the number who are retarded.
ОглавлениеIt will not be worth while to spend any time demonstrating that all individuals differ, at birth and during their subsequent life, physically. The fact is patent to all. It carries with it as a necessary corollary mental differences, since the brain is part of the body; nevertheless, we shall demonstrate these mental differences independently.
We present in Fig. 8 a graph from E. L. Thorndike, showing the number of 10-year-old children in Connecticut (1903) in each school grade. If the children are all intellectually equal, all the 10-year-olds ought to be in the same grade, or near it. Numerous explanations of their wide distribution suggest themselves; as a working hypothesis one might adopt the suggestion that it is because the children actually differ in innate ability to the extent here indicated. This hypothesis can be tested by a variety of mental measurements. S. A. Courtis' investigation of the arithmetical abilities of the children in the schools of New York City will be a good beginning. He measured the achievements of pupils in responding to eight tests, which were believed to give a fair idea of the pupil's capacity for solving simple arithmetical problems. The results were, on the average, similar to the result he got in a certain eighth-grade class, whose record is shown in Fig. 9. It is evident that some of the children were good in arithmetic, some were poor in it; the bulk of them were neither good nor bad but half way between, or, in statistical language, mediocre.
VARIATION IN ABILITY
