Nature and nurture, the problem of the future : a presidential address delivered by Karl Pearson at the annual meeting of the Social and Political Education League, April 28, 1910.

  • Pearson, Karl, 1857-1936.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Nature and nurture, the problem of the future : a presidential address delivered by Karl Pearson at the annual meeting of the Social and Political Education League, April 28, 1910. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    discussions are no use, philosophical reasoning is no use. We need to observe, measure, and record, to analyse by the methods of exact science, before we can advance in our sociology, before we can aid our working classes to a true insight of the factors which make for or mar our national vigour. That lesson was the experience I gained as a lecturer for this League some thirty years ago. It took me, as a slow thinker, several years to learn it, and very little return I made for that to me inestimable knowledge. Briefly, this is what I learnt : I am endeavouring to help, where I am really ignorant. These men ask me as to the facts of human life and I reply with theory and dogma. The university has omitted the great essential for social woik a concrete study of man. We have yet to collect the data upon which such a study can be based—the very calculus by which it can be analysed has yet to be invented. I am speaking of thirty years ago. It would be in- vidious to mention individual workers in this field during the past thirty years; but one name I will mention, that of Francis Galton, who in his papers of the decade centring round 1880 gave social workers the foundation on which the calculus of correlation has been finally estab- lished. Quietly also, and without our fully realizing it, masses of sociological data are nowr being officially col- lected and partially tabled. I refer to the medical inspec- tion of school children by the county council education boards. The schedules drawn up, especially in the case of industrial school children, contain parental data often of the highest value—wages of father, rent, number of rooms, occupation of mother, number of living and dead children, health of parents, record of special diseases and disabilities, and much else of interest. Not only is this official infor-