Eugenics in America essays

Eugenics in America essays What do you think of when you hear the word eugenics? Well, one thing that should come to mind is Hitler and what he did with the Jews and other people he thought were noncompliant to what he had in mind was the perfect human race. Not only did Hitler do this, but the American people thought it was ok in the mid 19th century. Even in our time there are some things that people are doing that could be considered as eugenics, such as genetic testing. These things and others will be talked about in this paper, and they will attempt to be better explained. What a few people think about eugenics is not necessarily what everybody else thinks about it. The reason for saying this is because from the mid 20th century up to the present, geneticists have been doing genetic testing. One main question that will be addressed is how have we as Americans and other societies of the world tried to control the science of improving the human stock for social and political reasons since 1865. To a nswer this question I guess we will have to start at the beginning. Eugenics was probably really started when Alfred Binet came up with the intelligence test in France. The test was made up of a series of short tasks that were in some way related to everyday problems. The hardest task that was successfully completed was associated to a persons mental age. There were however some concerns that Binet had because of the test. Some of these concerns were: it distinguished between natural knowledge and instruction and he worried about self-fulfilling prophecies. He intended for the test to be used for good to identify children to help and improve rather than to label and limit students. There was someone that wanted to use this test to distinguish between people of good mental health and those that were morons (Goddard). The person that wanted to do this was H H Goddard. He brought Binets scale to America fro...