GUINEA-PIG SURVEY

Dr. Rothney of the Graduate School of Education yesterday published his opinion, based on investigations in three Massachusetts towns, that a child's future success in life can be judged by his first year in primary school. Those students who, at the age of six, showed qualities of leadership, good behavior, concentration, intelligence and high scholastic standing, Dr. Rothney maintains, are now holding jobs, while those displaying a lack of these attributes are among the ranks of the unemployed. The latitude of this statement, valuable as the direction of the research obviously is, leaves ample room for legitimate doubts and questions.

The seventeen - hundred children whom Dr. Rothney chose as subjects entered school in 1922 at the approximate age of six, graduating in June 1934. In other words they have been "seeking their own way in the world" for a scant year and a half, yet Dr. Rothney asserts confidently that their records up to the present time vindicate his theory. Just why success in life should depend on a boy's employment or non-employment within two years of graduating from high school, Dr. Rothney did not bother to explain.

His investigations, moreover, were confined to pupils in the high schools of three Massachusetts towns, a singularly restricted erea of examination. No private schools or distant fields of endeavor were included in the experiment, and little or no effort at obtaining a general cross-section was made. In addition, the primary assumption that the surface character of the six-year old is all-important, obviously places too much emphasis on heredity and too little on environment. A great many self-made men began life in an extremely inauspicious way, only awakening from what might be termed "paralysis of the ambition" after their connections with local schools had been summarily severed. Dr. Rothney, therefore, has some amazing historical exceptions to reconcile with his recently publicized ideas.

Premature publication of embryonic theorics, so ably exposed and satirized in Sinclair Lewis's "Arrowsmith", needs to further declamation. Likewise, the restricted field of Dr. Rothney's experiment in no way justifies his broad conclusion. In his haste to augment educational knowledge, he has forgotten the classic warning to those who would prove their point by logical argment, that "because a cow is an animal, it does not follow that all animals are cows".