[The Family and it’s Members by Anna Garlin Spencer]@TWC D-Link book
The Family and it’s Members

CHAPTER IX
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Doctor Ward, on the contrary, looks to education, controlled and improved environment, and the stimulus for all people to be gained from more scientific knowledge more widely distributed.

In his famous article, entitled "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics,"[12] Doctor Ward says that "eugenists tend to emphasize unduly the intellectual qualities" and "manifest more or less contempt for the affective faculties." "Nature," he thinks, "is far wiser and seeks to prevent all extremes." He also reminds us that "much that is called genius is pathologic and linked to the abnormal and the insane." Perhaps few would agree with Doctor Ward that "genius is scattered somewhat uniformly through the whole mass of the population and needs only favoring circumstances to bring it to conscious expression." But that thought challenges attention.

He would improve mankind, first, by getting rid of error through the full use of demonstrated scientific knowledge and, second, by a "nurture" in accord with the laws of progress.
=Euthenics and Eudemics.=--The pioneer treatment of "Euthenics," or "The Science of Controllable Environment," with its "Plea for Better Living Conditions as a First Step Toward Higher Human Efficiency," was given by Ellen H.Richards in 1910.

Doctor Ward, in alluding to this, reminds us that "there is a tendency for the avenues of progress to become choked and normal upward movements checked" and that "we must at all times take vigorous action and in the direction of the betterment of the human race." In respect to "Eudemics," or the doctrine of the welfare of the masses of the people-at-large, Doctor Ward uses the term first suggested to Doctor Dealey, of Brown University, by Doctor Koopman, Librarian of that University, with approval, and gives it a meaning of the greatest social helpfulness.
In his view it is not a misfortune that society is being to so great an extent recruited from the so-called "lower classes." If there are signs of decadence anywhere, he thinks, they are not in the "proletariat;" they are among the "pampered rich," not the "hampered poor." =New Types of Genius.=--Again, his plea is for universal education in real knowledge and true inference from facts of life and a universal sharing of the really best things to secure a just quota of genius and talent from all classes.

It seems clear that we are not obliged to limit our hopes for "flowers of the family" to the few at the top of the social pyramid.


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