170 OTIS W. CALDWELL 



selves and our ancestors, and usually about our descendants. With the 

 frankness of modern youth, these questions may be discussed upon a factual 

 basis, and interpretations made that may possibly produce highly important 

 attitudes. My observation has been that pupils under guidance of a wise 

 and factually-minded biology teacher, may be led to useful discussions of 

 the needed applications of eugenical knowledge. An evasive, self conscious 

 or wrongly-minded teacher, or a fault-finding and misunderstanding parent 

 may make it quite unwise for eugenical applications to be attempted, until 

 the obstacles have been removed. The biology course might well close with 

 a clear presentation of the fact that each of us has secured through inheri- 

 tance some good and some bad qualities; that we may select and change our 

 environment and our controls so that our best qualities may be enhanced, 

 and our worst qualities restricted or suppressed; that we are the in- 

 dividuals through whom the qualities of future peoples are determined, and 

 that what is done about these qualities in the succeeding generations is of 

 supreme concern to the future of mankind. 



Personally, it seems to me, that biology, as a subject of general public 

 education, has a service to perform scarcely visioned as yet by those respon- 

 sible for the administration of public education, possibly not by very many 

 leading biologists. Real biology may become a factual guide for social 

 philosophy. 



Too often our public lectures on eugenics have been associated with ideas 

 of prevention of any kind of inheritance. Data published in the past week 

 indicate that the East Harlem region and not the Riverside region of New 

 York is concerned about the future of New York's human race. During 

 1931, the number of East Harlem births was 23.65 per 1,000 population. 

 The Riverside region had 11.01 births per 1,000 population. The Williams 

 Bridge region of the Bronx had 18.71 births per 1,000 population, and the 

 Red Hook region of Brooklyn had 18.60 births per 1,000 population. These 

 data and many others of similar nature raise a very fundamental question 

 about so-called eugenical instruction of certain kinds. College graduates 

 from certain colleges where much instruction about eugenics is known 

 to be given, instead of using selective care and discrimination to insure a 

 fair number of improved offspring, have used their education as a means of 

 preventing offspring to a point showing failure of some of these groups to 

 maintain themselves. Proper instruction in eugenics is designed to establish 

 an improved human race, not to define a scholarly ideal about a future 

 human race but make little contribution to its realization. 



