Henry

Henry

1

CJ 212
Henry Herbert Goddard


Allan Skrocki
CJ 212 Online
20 April 2008


Henry Goddard was born in East Vassalboro, Maine in1866. He was the youngest of five children, and the only boy, of Henry Clay Goddard and Sarah Winslow Goddard. Two of his four sisters died in infancy and his father was injured by a bull and died when he was nine years old. His mother later remarried and traveled the United States with her new husband. Henry was enrolled in Oak Grove Seminary in 1877 and in 1878 he became a student at the Friends School in Providence, Rhode Island. It was during this time that he met Rufus Jones. Henry and Rufus would later co-found the American Friends Service Committee, which Received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. Goddard graduated from Haverford College in 1887 with a B.A. and graduated again in 1889 with a Master’s in Mathematics (Plucker).
Henry Herbert Goddard was a psychologist who worked in the fields of special education and mental retardation. He is best known as one of the founders of intelligence testing in the United States (VandenBos). He believed that the main determiner of human conduct is intelligence. He believed that intelligence is hereditary and that later influences in life do little to change it. Throughout the years, Henry Goddard continued


his work and was either a leader or a participant in every significant event occurring during the genesis of American psychometrics (Plucker: Human Intelligence).
Goddard was concerned with separating the retarded from the feeble-minded. He believed retarded people suffered from poor health and needed help but feeble-minded people had a decreased mental capacity and required a special curriculum. Goddard believed that the Binet-Simon intelligence tests could help in assessing the nature of the problem and began to advocate the use of the scales in the United States. Goddard translated the tests from French to...

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