THE REAL ERROR OF CYRIL BURTtion that a trait represents nature unaffected by nurture does not
guarantee its ineluctable state. Burt inherited poor vision. No doc-
tor ever rebuilt his eyes to an engineer's paradigm of normal
design, but Burt wore eyeglasses and the only clouding of his vision
was conceptual.
The Backward Child also abounds in tangential statements that
record Burt's hereditarian biases. He writes about an environmen-
tal handicap—recurrent catarrh among the poor—and discusses
hereditary susceptibility (quite plausible) with an arresting quip for
graphic emphasis:
... exceptionally prevalent in those whose faces are marked by develop-
mental defects—by the round receding forehead, the protruding muzzle,
the short and upturned nose, the thickened lips, which combine to give to
the slum child's profile a negroid or almost simian outline.... "Apes that
are hardly anthropoid" was the comment of one headmaster, who liked to
sum up his cases in a phrase (1937, p. 186).
He wonders about the intellectual achievement of Jews and attri-
butes it, in part, to inherited myopia that keeps them off the play-
ing fields and adapts them for poring over account books.
Before the invention of spectacles, the Jew whose living depended upon
his ability to keep accounts and read them, would have been incapacitated
by the age of 50, had he possessed the usual tendency to hypermetropia:
on the other hand (as I can personally testify) the myope... can dispense
with glasses for near work without much loss of efficiency (1937, p. 219).BURT'S BLINDNESS
The blinding power of Burt's hereditarian biases can best be
appreciated by studying his approach to subjects other than intel-
ligence. For here he consistently showed a commendable caution.
He recognized the complexity of causation and the subtle influence
that environment can exert. He railed against simplistic assump-
tions and withheld judgment pending further evidence. Yet as
soon as Burt returned to his favorite subject of intelligence, the
blinders descended and the hereditarian catechism came forward
again.
Burt wrote with power and sensitivity about the debilitating
effects of poor environments. He noted that 23 percent of the
cockney youth he interviewed had never seen a field or a patch of