Anthropometrics in the U. S. Bureau of Education: The Case of Arthur MacDonald's "Laboratory"
1977; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/368125
ISSN1748-5959
Autores Tópico(s)Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology
ResumoIN EARLY 1892, Arthur MacDonald, a young docent in applied ethics from Clark University in Wocester, Massachusetts, traveled to Washington to assume the duties of specialist in education as preventive of pauperism and crime for the United States Bureau of Education. Hired by the Hegelian philosopher and Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, he quickly won the approval and praise of his superiors. By the middle of the decade, however, Harris became aware of several disturbing tendencies in his new clerk-specialist. Instead of gathering material for use by educational experts, MacDonald was accumulating instruments for the study of anthropometrics (the measurement of physical characteristics and speculation about their effects upon psychology). Worse, some of the material MacDonald presented to the department, and some which he published in outside books and articles, showed that he was advocating controversial theories of criminology inspired by Cesare Lombroso in Italy and Alphonse Bertillon in France. MacDonald thought he had found a direct link between physical appearance and criminality, insanity, and poverty, in other words, a system of physical stigmata. On the basis of this, he proposed to reorient education from its traditional emphasis upon development toward considerations of hygiene. By the late 1890's, MacDonald sensed that his position in the Bureau was becoming untenable, and he started to agitate for the creation of a separate organization, reporting to the Interior Department, which would explicitly undertake the laboratory study of abnormality and criminality. Harris, now deeply distressed by what MacDonald advocated and hostile to a cause which ran so clearly across the path of his philosophic idealism, was embarrassed by his clerk's behind-the-scenes manoeuvering in Congress. He fired his specialist in 1902. MacDonald spent the next thirty years in Washington, vainly organizing support
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