Henry Herbert Goddard was a distinguished American Psychologist who was well known for the study of human intelligence and Eugenics. He was born to a Quaker family in Maine as the youngest of five children. Growing up Goddard lost his father, Henry Clay Goddard, to an existing injury he acquired when he was brought down by a bull. His mother, Sarah Winslow Goddard, eventually remarried and went on to travel with her missionary husband throughout the United States. During this time, Goddard attended boarding school and later went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College. After earning his degree, he set off to California to visit an older sister. While staying there, he had a temporary teaching position at the University of Southern…show more content… After earning his degree, Goddard accepted a position as a teacher in a small Quaker school in Ohio, where he later also became principal. Following that year Goddard met and married Emma Florence Robbins; with whom he never had children. By 1899, Goddard studied and earned a doctorate from Clark University, where he studied under G. Stanley Hall. In the following years, he became a professor at a school in Pennsylvania, where he found a growing interest to study children. More specifically, those with ill-defined minds. Subsequently, he had the opportunity to meet on various occasions “Edward Johnstone, the superintendent of the New Jersey Homes for Feeble-Minded Children in Vineland, along with the educator Earle Barnes [who] founded a Feeble-Minded Club” (Cohen & Swerdlik, 2018). After serving a few years of frustration with his teaching position, Goddard then moved to New Jersey, where his friend Johnstone made him “the Director of Research at New Jersey’s Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys, the first clinical laboratory to study mental retardation” (University of Missouri [Mizzou], 2011). During his time here, he observed the interdisciplinary exchange of philosophies concerning special education. With his interest in discovering new ways to measure children’s intellectual functioning, Goddard traveled to Europe to study methods that other researchers used to approach the study of mentally challenged
