Terman And Jordan's Analysis

To try to achieve something, there are many ways to do it. Two eugenists chose an unacceptable way to attain their goal. In the early 1900s, Lewis Terman and Bart Jordan used eugenics to make the world smarter. After that, Palo Alto’s school district commenced two middle schools and named it after Terman and Jordan. Decades later, several students and parents want to change Terman and Jordan’s school name because they realized that their actions were intolerable. Even though Terman and Jordan tried to increase the general population's intelligence, a more in-depth analysis shows that their plan would fail. Additionally, these two cruel men wanted to bring back racism and segregation, and they intended to terminate races and hurt innocent people.
By using tests, Terman and Jordan convinced many schools “to place slow students into special classes, rigid academic tracks, or entirely separate schools” (Stoskopf). Here, smart students were in one school and the people who do not meet a certain standard on a standardized test go to a different one. Even though Terman and Jordan did not explain the two school's differences thoroughly, the “smart” school probably has better resources and teachers than the “unintelligent” school. This is outrageous because Terman and Jordan’s actions are the same as what white people did to people of color, which is racism, a belief that should be abolished. They treated them unfairly because the whites thought the other races did not have as many abilities as their own. Even if racism was accepted, it is unfair to some students because the tests might not contain a person’s academic strength. Additionally, PAUSD's mission statement, it states, “we allow ALL students to acquire educational and social competencies…”, but Terman and Jordan did the exact opposite, therefore, two prominent figures in Palo Alto have to be banished, or else the mission statement would be invalid (District, Palo Alto Unified School). Besides separating the students, Terman and Jordan claimed that African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Latino children “cannot master abstractions that can often be made into efficient workers” (Terman 92). In other words, the two eugenicists believe that the three races listed above are too ignorant to work in the real world because they cannot learn challenging concepts. Racism is shown here because the degradation is targeted to specific races. Also, people look at that person’s skill rather than their race, for example, Martin Luther King, an African-American who changed the world completely. This proves that