Evangelizing Eugenics: A Brief Historiography of Popular and Formal American Eugenics Education (1908-1948)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the history of the American Eugenics movement’s penetration into the formal and popular educational milieu during the first half of the 20th Century, and includes a review of some recent scholarly research on eugenic themes in education and popular culture. Apologists have dismissed the American Eugenics movement as a shortlived, racist, reactionary, and pseudoscientific aberration that was already dying long before the collapse of the Third Reich. Many official histories of biology and various social science disciplines including education were sanitized to expunge or trivialize the involvement of a host of important prophets, disciples, and evangelists in the eugenics movement. It was also common to divorce the research and statistical methods developed in the service of eugenics from their inspiration and original application to Galton’s secular religion of human betterment. In the last few decades, however, a new generation of scholars began to re-examine and illuminate the breadth and depth of the eugenics movement: its devotees and devotees’ actions and influence on their professions or academic disciplines and on society. These scholars also looked into how eugenics penetrated educational thought, curriculum, courses, and texts; thereby, revealing a panoply of overlapping interests, academic programs, organizations, and influential individuals that fatefully intersected and synergistically recombined into a powerful social movement throughout the first half of the 1900s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".