Scientific developments in the twentieth century have redefined the natural world in ways largely unforeseen by earlier generations. The impact of these developments has extended far beyond the laboratory and into nonscientific realms such as the arts, humanities, and social research. Consider, for instance, Salvador Dalí’s “Persistence of Memory.” Scholars point to the soft watches in this painting as representing the penetration of popular conceptions of Einsteinian relativity, time, and space in the art world. In terms of educational ideas and institutions, the impact of science and related societallevel developments has been profound. This is particularly true of advances in twentieth-century biology and physics, which highlight the interactions between science and education in relation to broad social and cultural concerns—the subject of this entry.
Biology
Some of the most impressive and broadly influential advances in twentieth-century biology have come from the field of biogenetics. The foundations of this field were laid in the initially dormant work of Austrian priest Gregor Mendel (1822–1884). His analysis of genetic variation in pea plants, not discovered until 1900, gave rise to the study of genetics. The significance of his work centered on ratios he developed suggesting that statistical laws governed trait variations as passed down from generation to generation. Reasons for the rise of the study of genetics include the success of Mendelian theory and methodology as well as interest in potential social applications of genetic research.
Eugenics
Popular interest in human genetic variation fueled society wide developments such as the eugenics movement. According to its leading proponent, Francis Galton (1822–1911), eugenics aimed at the improvement of human traits by way of a social policy governing human reproduction. Inspired, in part, by the work of animal breeders (rather than by Mendel), Galton created statistical tools to study variation in human populations as well as the general stability of differences between race characteristics. A “hereditarian” school of thought developed around his work and these tools.
Formal institutional support for the school emerged with the founding of the Eugenics Laboratory at University College London (1906), the Balfour Chair of Genetics at Cambridge University (1912), and the Eugenics Record Office at New York’s Cold Spring Harbor (1906). Social policy, influenced by the ideas of hereditarians, also appeared in the Immigration Act of 1924. This act sought to restrict non-western European immigration. Meanwhile, seventeen state-level enactments supported sterilization of criminals, in many cases including those considered mentally feeble. By the 1930s, thousands of the so-called feebleminded had been sterilized as a result. The state of Virginia carried out forced sterilizations until 1972.
Educational Impacts
The work of hereditarians had an immediate and lasting impact on education. Psychologist and eugenicist Henry Herbert Goddard helped construct America’s first intelligence testing instruments and also wrote one of the most popular works in eugenics, The Kallikak Family. Goddard had originally imported the work of French psychologist Alfred Binet, originator of modern intelligence testing, and drew from it when appointed to a committee of psychologists charged with sorting U.S. military personnel during World War I.
After the war, Goddard and his colleagues, including Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes, advocated the use of intelligence testing in schools to provide for an efficient means of sorting students into various tracks. What most testers believed they were testing was an inherited native intelligence unaffected by environmental factors. What Binet had long before discovered was that testing for intellectual abilities was highly influenced by social class and educational background. During the interwar period, the Army intelligence test became the foundation for the SAT. The SAT was first used mostly by high school students aiming to attend elite universities. The practice expanded to approximately 2 million college aspirants by 1970. The impact of eugenicist thought on education, however, extended beyond testing and made its way into the textbook.
During the first half of the twentieth century, nearly three fourths of high school and college biology texts described the field of eugenics as a veritable science; about half of the same discussed favorable mating policies for socially superior individuals and the opposite for the socially inferior. Thus, students were not only tested as a result of eugenicist ideas about social efficiency but also taught sympathetic views about eugenics in biology texts.
Debates over the implications of intelligence testing continued throughout the second half of the twentieth century and, in part, culminated with the scholarly storm surrounding The Bell Curve, published in the mid-1990s. The authors, Richard Murray and Charles Herrnstein, argued for the dismantling of educational programs such as Head Start on the basis of intelligence testing that they believe suggests immutable native intelligence. More recent developments in genetics with the Human Genome Project have raised social and ethical questions about the role genetic testing will play in employment practices, the insurance industry, and access to education.
Physics
At the very start of the twentieth century, leading physicists declared that little else in their field was left to be discovered. Suggesting that the outlines of matter, energy, and motion had, with great clarity, been determined, they encouraged scientists to fill in the details rather than work on new conceptual frameworks. Within the first decades of the century, however, classical Newtonian physics was turned on its head with the rise of Einsteinian relativity, quantum mechanics, and puzzling discoveries in astrophysics. When it comes to popular conceptions of twentieth-century physics, the common inclination is to think of the atomic bomb (rather than relativity, quantum mechanics, or, more recently, string theory). Early developments in the study of atomic energy can be traced back to breakthroughs in the conception of the atom itself and, in 1939, the discovery of fission.
Nuclear Physics
The latter discovery opened the possibility of direct military and social applications of nuclear physics. Military applications were obvious, but hardly inevitable, in the construction of nuclear weapons. Because fission’s discovery occurred within the context of the start of World War II, several nations launched research programs in the area. The most famous program, the Manhattan Project, focused the attention of more than a dozen Nobel laureates to the task of overcoming conceptual and technical hurdles in the race to create the first atomic bomb. Their efforts directly resulted in the weaponry used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After World War II, continued research into such weapons as the hydrogen bomb and the neutron bomb were fueled by the Cold War arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States. In the meantime, social applications of nuclear physics focused on the production of civilian energy. Russian scientists and technologists developed the first civilian reactor in 1954, with the British and Americans doing the same in the years that followed.
Educational Impacts
The impact that developments in physics had on education was felt at all levels. Through such programs as the Manhattan Project, higher education forged relationships with the military and industry that irrevocably changed the culture and nature of research in American colleges and universities. Physics became a dominant field of study that attracted billions of dollars for research (approximately 2 billion dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project alone) and assumed a formidable presence on university campuses. Competition increased between institutions for federal and other funding. Classified research, moreover, put a strain on scholars accustomed to higher education’s culture of the free exchange of ideas. In short, American institutions of higher education were fundamentally transformed by collaborations formed with the military and industry as a result of developments in the field of physics.
Students in primary through secondary schools, meanwhile, received preparation for living in a world with the results of nuclear research. Curricular developments and school practices made educators conduits of information on how to appreciate rather than fear atomic energy as well as how to respond to a nuclear catastrophe in the event of war. The Federal Civil Defense Administration disseminated educational materials, booklets, pamphlets, and animated film strips. Some taught about the “peaceful atom” that produced civilian energy; others, such as the animated “Duck and Cover,” offered advice on what to do in case of an atomic attack.
School practices also changed as a result, with planned and surprise drills occurring in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities considered to be targets of Soviet aggression. In Los Angeles alone, thousands of teachers were enlisted to teach hundreds of thousands of students tactics for surviving a nuclear blast in the early 1950s. Meanwhile, schools themselves were fitted to serve not only as the locus of education, but also as community fallout shelters. The new “double duty” philosophy restructured the appearance of classrooms. Windows in the classroom, once valued as a fundamental aspect of school design, were seen as sources of weakness in the event of a nuclear attack and discouraged in new school construction.
Bibliography:
- Brown, J. (1988). “A is for atom, B is for bomb”: Civil defense in American public education, 1948–1963. Journal of American History, 75, 68–90.
- Kevles, D. (1985). In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity. New York: Knopf.
- Lemann, N. (1999). The big test: The secret history of the American meritocracy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Rhodes, R. (1986). The making of the atomic bomb. New York: Touchstone.
- Selden, S. (1999). Inheriting shame: The story of eugenics and racism in America. New York: Teachers College Press.
- Zenderland, L. (1998). Measuring minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the origins of American intelligence testing. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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