3 / 2 THE MISMEASURE OF MANgrass, not "even in a Council park," 64 percent had never seen a
train, and 98 percent had never seen the sea. The following pas-
sage displays a measure of paternalistic condescension and stereo-
typing, but it also presents a powerful image of poverty in working-
class homes, and its intellectual effect upon children (1937, p. 127).
His mother and father know astonishingly little of any life except their
own, and have neither the time nor the leisure, neither the ability nor the
disposition, to impart what little they know. The mother's conversation
may be chiefly limited to the topics of cleaning, cooking, and scolding. The
father, when not at work, may spend most of his time "round the corner"
refreshing a worn-out body, or sitting by the fire with cap on and coat off,
sucking his pipe in gloomy silence. The vocabulary that the child absorbs
is restricted to a few hundred words, most of them inaccurate, uncouth, or
mispronounced, and the rest unfit for reproduction in the schoolroom. In
the home itself there is no literature that deserves the title; and the child's
whole universe is closed in and circumscribed by walls of brick and a pall
of smoke. From one end of the year to the other, he may go no farther
than the nearest shops or the neighborhood recreation ground. The coun-
try or the seaside are mere words to him, dimly suggesting some place to
which cripples are sent after an accident, visualized perhaps in terms of
some photographic "souvenir from Southend" or some pictorial
"memento from Margate," all framed in shells, brought back by his par-
ents on a bank-holiday trip a few weeks after their wedding.
Burt appended this comment from a "burly bus conductor" to his
description: "Book learning isn't for kids that'll have to earn their
bread. It's only for them as likes to give themselves the hairs of the
'ighbrow."
Burt could apply what he understood so well to subjects other
than intelligence. Consider his views on juvenile delinquency and
left-handedness. Burt wrote extensively on the cause of delin-
quency and attributed it to complex interactions between children
and their environment: "The problem never lies in the 'problem
child' alone: it lies always in the relations between that child and his
environment" (1940, p. 243). If poor behavioral performance mer-
its such an assessment, why not say the same about poor intellectual
performance? One might suspect that Burt relied again upon test
scores, arguing that delinquents tested well and could not be mis-
behaving as a result of innate stupidity. But, in fact, delinquents
often tested as badly as poor children regarded by Burt as innately
deficient in intelligence. Yet Burt recognized that IQ scores of