Transcript for Eugenics

My name is Wendy Harris and I’m a high school social studies teacher at Metro Deaf School here in St. Paul, and I’ve been working as a teacher-in-residence at the History Center, pulling together primary source sets with materials from the Library of Congress and other places to be able to use them in our classrooms. 

This set I’m talking about today is about eugenics, and there are three subsets within the overall set. 

The first is about the pseudoscience of eugenics–that it’s a false science, eugenics is not an actual thing. The idea was that the best families, the fittest people, should reproduce and have more children. Others should be denied the opportunity or discouraged the opportunity of having children.

The second group is immigration policies, starting with 1882 immigration policy and some images of what that looked like and what impact that had.

And the third set is about forced sterilization, which has happened even up to pretty much the present day, related to a lot of eugenics-based ideas. 

Students can interact with these sources in a variety of ways. One way is to analyze the status quo, and who is considered fit to be parents. What are current ideas of fit parents? When do children get taken out of their homes? How is that reflected in any of this historical background material?

Another way is to broaden the scope of ethics around eugenics. Famous people who used eugenics are Nazis. But here in the U.S., eugenics has sort of shifted into genetics. And some ideas around genetics that we do now, we do genetic testing during pregnancy and other times. What things are being tested for? Why would those things be tested for? Is that something we want to have happen? Who makes those decisions? 

All of these things could be included in a conversation about ethics, about policies, and about historical views on people.

You can find these sources on the History Center website, and you can delve in with your students and use these in your classroom.