Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

Fantasy Football Challenge - Library of Books for Football Fanatics

Fantasy Football Challenge presents
Popular Science Monthly

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Eugene Davenport in which he makes this statement: 'Ward's arguments as here employed seem to show that environment is a powerful factor in bringing out talent even to the exclusion of heredity. I doubt if you would care to be understood to this limit, and yet where you enumerate on page 61 the reasons why certain cities are fecund in respective talents, you seem to have overlooked the fact that if these cities have been for many generations centers of talent to such an extent as to provide exceptional environmental influences, the same conditions would also provide exceptional parentage, so that the birthrate of talent would be much higher in such a region than the normal. In other words, the very same conditions which would provide exceptional opportunities for development also and at the same time provide an exceptional birth condition. This is the rock on which very many arguments tending to compare heredity and environment wreck themselves.'[5] [5] This is a criticism that needs to be met. Mr. George R. Davies of this institution has submitted facts in a paper which appeared in the March number of the Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota, which fills in the gap. He shows relative to American cities that there has been little or no segregation of talented parentage. We have arrived at a point where we are able to consider the question of the conservation of talent. A position of advantage has been gained from which to view this question. For we have seen that talent has a decidedly important and indispensable social function to perform. It is the creative and contributive agency, the cause of achievement, and a vital factor in progress. Its conservation is consequently devoutly to be desired. We have also discovered the fact that, while a rare commodity, it is present in society in a larger measure than we have commonly believed. If progress is desirable in a measure it is likely to be desirable in a large measure. If talent is able to carry us forward at a certain rate with the development of a minimum of the quantity that is in existence we should be able to greatly accelerate our progress if all that is latent could be developed and put into active operation. Further, we have obtained some insight into the conditions which favor the development of talent and likewise some of the obstacles to its manifestation. If it abounds where certain conditions are present in the situation and fails to appear where those conditions are absent, we have a fertile suggestion as to the method of social control and direction which will bring the latent talent to fertility. We must undoubtedly hold that if a larger supply of talent exists than is discovered, developed and put to use that, since, as we have seen, it is so valuable when estimated in terms of social progress, we are dealing wastefully with talent. We are allowing great ability to go to waste since we are leaving it lie in its undeveloped form. Therefore one of the problems of the proper conservation of talent consists in finding a method of discovering and releasing this valuable form of social energy. When we come to inquire how this may be done, how this discovery is to take place, we must take for our guide the facts which were found to bear on the maturing of talent in the above studies. We discovered that the local environment seemed to contain the influential element in bringing forth talent. When that local environment was analyzed it turned out that the items of opportunity for leisure and the facilities for education were the most fruitful factors. Leisure is absolutely essential to afford that opportunity for self-development which is required even of the most talented. This can only be had when the income of the individual is sufficient to give him a considerable part of his active time for carrying out his intellectual aspirations. We have great numbers of people whom we have reason to believe are as able on the average, have as large a proportion of talent as the well-to-do, whose poverty is so crushing and whose days of toil are so long and so consuming of energy that the element of leisure is lacking. It is only an occasional individual of this class of people who is able to secure the wealth which means a measure of leisure by which he is able to mount out of obscurity. An improvement in the physical conditions of life of these people, together with an increase in their economic possibilities is a necessary means to the proper conservation of the talent of this group. The cultural factor is one which must be made more omnipresent than it is now before we shall be able to awake the latent talent of the masses of people. There are certain sections of all nations, and more especially of such nations as the United States, where the population is widely scattered over vast areas of farming regions in which the opportunities for education and stimulative enterprises and institutions are lacking or meager. The same is true of very large sections of the populations of the cities. In both cases large neighborhoods exist in which the lives of the people move in a humdrum rut, never disturbed by matters which arouse the creative element in human nature. Especially is this important in the early years of life where the outlook for the whole future of the individual is so strongly stamped. To come into contact with no stimulus and arousing agent in the home, or the neighborhood in the earliest years is to become settled into a life-long habit of inert dullness. When we revert to the schools which so generally abound, we fail to find the stimulating element in them which might be regarded as the necessary opportunity to develop talent. The vast majority of elementary teachers are persons whose intellectual natures have never been aroused. Their imaginative and sympathetic capacities lie undeveloped. Their work in the school is conducted on the basis of memory. It is parrot work and ends in making parrots of the pupils. The rational and causal as agencies in education are hardly ever appealed to. Until our teaching force is itself developed in the directions and capacities which alone characterize the intellectual we can not hope for much in the way of recovering the rich field of latent talent from its infertility.

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