The Science and Politics of I.q.

L. J. Kamin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780898591293
• eBook ISBN: 9781136557873
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Published in 1974, The Science and Politics of I.q. is a valuable contribution to the field of Education.

1

THE PIONEERS OF I.Q. TESTING IN AMERICA

Terman was unapologetic about where he thought I.Q. comes from. He believed in the inheritance of I.Q., at least to a considerable degree.

—Professor Richard Herrnstein, 1971¹

The first usable intelligence test was developed in France by Alfred Binet in 1905. The basic facts are known to everybody who has taken a college course in psychology, and are available in any textbook. The French Minister of Public Instruction had commissioned Binet to develop a testing procedure that could help to identify students whose academic aptitudes were so low as to necessitate their placement in “special schools.”

The test developed by Binet was very largely atheoretical. He viewed it as a practical diagnostic instrument and was not concerned to “make a distinction between acquired and congenital feeblemindedness.”² Binet in fact prescribed therapeutic courses in “mental orthopedics “for those with low test scores. His chapter on “The Training of Intelligence” began with the phrase “After the illness, the remedy,” and his judgment on “some recent philosophers” who had given their “moral support” to the idea that”the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity, a quantity which one cannot augment” is clear: “We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.”³

With this orientation, it is perhaps as well that Binet died in 1911, before witnessing the uses to which his test was speedily put in the United States. The major translators and importers of the Binet test were Lewis Terman at Stanford, Henry Goddard at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, and Robert Yerkes at Harvard. These pioneers of the American mental testing movement held in common some basic sociopolitical views. Their “brutal pessimism” took a very specific political form, manifested by their enthusiastic memberships in various eugenic societies and organizations. They arrived at the remarkable conclusion that the questions asked of children by the Binet test provided a fixed measure of “innate intelligence.” The test could thus be used to detect the genetically inferior, whose reproduction was a menace to the future of the state. The communality of their views—and their divergence from Binet's—can best be illustrated by quotations from their early writings.

The Americanized “Stanford-Binet” test was published by Terman in a 1916 book.⁴ The promise of the test was made explicit in the opening chapter:

… in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency. It is hardly necessary to emphasize that the high-grade cases, of the type now so frequently overlooked, are precisely the ones whose guardianship it is most important for the State to assume.

Terman asserted that “there is no investigator who denies the fearful role played by mental deficiency in the production of vice, crime, and delinquency.” The cause of mental deficiency — and by implication of crime — was transparently clear. “Heredity studies of ‘degenerate’ families have confirmed, in a striking way, the testimony secured by intelligence tests.”

The test, in Terman's view, was particularly useful in the diagnosis of “high-grade” or “border-line” deficiency; that is, I. Q. ‘s in the 70–80 range. That level of intelligence

is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come … the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods. The writer predicts that when this is done there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.

Children of this group should be segregated in special classes.… They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers.… There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.⁵

The theme will reappear, so it is of interest to note that Terman did not draw a simple distinction between the white and the “colored” races. The “dull normals,” with I.Q.’s between 80 and 90, were said to be “below the actual average of intelligence among races of western European descent. …” The “New Immigration” from southeastern Europe was already, by the time Terman wrote, a matter of considerable national concern. The distinction between the “races” of western and southeastern Europe was made forcefully by Madison Grant's influential “The Passing of the Great Race,”⁶ and Terman's attribution of a high intelligence level to “races of western European descent” was clearly made in the light of concern over immigration policy.

Professor Terman's stern eugenical judgment fell, in any event, even-handedly on the very poor of all colors. Writing in 1917 under the heading “The Menace of Feeble-Mindedness,” he observed that

only recently have we begun to recognize how serious a menace it is to the social, economic and moral welfare of the state.… It is responsible … for the majority of cases of chronic and semi-chronic pauperism.…

… the feeble-minded continue to multiply … organized charities … often contribute to the survival of individuals who would otherwise not be able to live and reproduce.…

If we would preserve our state for a class of people worthy to possess it, we must prevent, as far as possible, the propagation of mental degenerates … curtailing the increasing spawn of degeneracy.⁷

The violence of Terman's language stands in melancholy affirmation of Binet's earlier reproof to teachers of the “feeble-minded.” “ The familiar proverb which says: ‘When one is stupid, it's for a long time’ seems to be taken literally, without criticism, by some school-masters; those who disinterest themselves in students who lack intelligence; they have for them neither sympathy nor even respect, as their intemperance of language makes them say before these children such things as: ‘This is a child who will never accomplish anything … he is poorly gifted.…’ Never! What a large word!”⁸

The views of Henry Goddard, who began to use the Binet test in 1908, did not differ in any important particular from those of Terman. The test data, to his mind, could be used to provide statistical support for the already demonstrated proposition that normal intelligence and “weak-mindedness” were the products of Mendelian inheritance. Perhaps the foremost of the “heredity studies of ‘degenerate’ families” cited by Terman was Goddard's lurid tracing of the family lines descended from one Martin Kallikak. With respect to the social menace of hereditary feeble-mindedness, Goddard had in 1912 predated Terman: “… we have discovered that pauperism and crime are increasing at an enormous rate, and we are led to pause and ask, ‘Why?’ Even a superficial investigation shows us that a large percentage of these troubles come from the feeble-minded. “⁹ The “troubles” had evidently caught the attention of alert social scientists who labored long before Professors Banfield¹⁰ or Herrnstein.¹¹

The sociopolitical views of the early mental testers are perhaps nowhere more clearly revealed than in Goddard's invited lectures at Princeton University in 1919. There Goddard discoursed on the new science of “mental levels.” That new science made possible the accurate assessment of the mental levels both of children and of adults, and those levels had been fixed by heredity. The new science had generated data of profound social significance, and in particular, it invalidated the arguments of gentlemen socialists.

These men in their ultra altruistic and humane attitude, their desire to be fair to the workman, maintain that the great inequalities in social life are wrong and unjust. For example, here is a man who says, “I am wearing $12.00 shoes, there is a laborer who is wearing $3.00 shoes; why should I spend $12.00 while he can only afford $3.00? I live in a home that is artistically decorated, carpets, high-priced furniture, expensive pictures and other luxuries; there is a laborer that lives in a hovel with no carpets, no pictures, and the coarsest kind of furniture. It is not right, it is unjust.” … As we have said, the argument is fallacious. It assumes that that laborer is on the same mental level with the man who is defending him.…

Now the fact is, that workman may have a ten year intelligence while you have a twenty. To demand for him such a home as you enjoy is as absurd as it would be to insist that every laborer should receive a graduate fellowship. How can there be such a thing as social equality with this wide range of mental capacity? The different levels of intelligence have different interests and require different treatment to make them happy.…

As for an equal distribution of the wealth of the world that is equally absurd. The man of intelligence has spent his money wisely, has saved until he has enough to provide for his needs in case of sickness, while the man of low intelligence, no matter how much money he would have earned, would have spent much of it foolishly and would never have anything ahead. It is said that during the past year, the coal miners in certain parts of the country have earned more money than the operators and yet today when the mines shut down for a time, those people are the first to suffer. They did not save anything, although their whole life has taught them that mining is an irregular thing and that when they were having plenty of work they should save against the days when they do not have work.…

These facts are appreciated. But it is not so fully appreciated that the cause is to be found in the fixed character of mental levels. In our ignorance we have said let us give these people one more chance — always one more chance.¹²

The progress from Binet's position is staggering. The feeble-minded, the paupers, and the unemployed coal miners now seem scarcely distinguishable. This is something more than the “brutal pessimism” protested by Binet. Whatever else we call it, this was a perversion of psychological “science.” There are few more vivid examples of the subordination of science to political and economic ideology.

The point of view of the third major importer of Binet's test, Robert Yerkes, is sufficiently indicated by his 1917 appointment as chairman of the Committee on Inheritance of Mental Traits of the Eugenics Research Association. The relation of I.Q. to heredity and to economic factors is made clear in Yerkes’ prescription for how “To make a true diagnosis of feeble-mindedness … never should such a diagnosis be made on the I.Q. alone.… We must inquire further into the subject's economic history. What is his occupation; his pay … we must learn what we can about his immediate family. What is the economic status or occupation of the parents? … When all this information has been collected … the psychologist may be of great value in getting the subject into the most suitable place in society.…”¹³

To be diagnosed as feeble-minded during this period, and to be assigned to a “suitable place,” was not an enviable lot. There were few fine discriminations drawn, as we have seen, among the criminal, the poor, and the dull-witted. The public institutions to provide for such degenerates were in many states administered by a single official, the “Commissioner of Charities and Corrections.” We catch some glimpses of the great value of mental testers to such institutions in the annual reports of Commissioner Wight to the Governor of the State of New Jersey. The commissioner's 1909 report, in discussing “the idiotic,” indicated that “They are now in the families, or distributed among the almshouses, and county and State institutions. I find a number of families where there are two or more such imbeciles, suggesting increased necessity for a careful inquiry into causes.”¹⁴

That careful inquiry was not long in forthcoming. Commissioner Wight's 1910 report contained for the first time a section headed “Research Work.”

This is the name we give to the inquiry into heredity, habit, environment, etc., of criminals and defectives, to locate more definitely the primary cause of crime and dependency. The initiative of this important movement was taken by Prof. E. R. Johnstone and Dr. H. A. Goddard of the Training School for Feeble Minded Children … The recent meeting of the Eugenic Section at Skillman … was well attended by experts … who seemed greatly interested in the results of our research work … the investigations show that the union of drunken fathers, and feeble minded or epileptic mothers is rapidly increasing the number of imbeciles whom the State is expected to support.…

I respectfully ask that a small appropriation be made to prosecute this research work, and send the facts out to the public.¹⁵

By 1911, h...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• COMPLEX HUMAN BEHAVIOR
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Pioneers of I.Q. Testing in America
• 2 Psychology and The Immigrant
• 3 Separated Identical Twins
• 4 Kinship Correlations
• 5 Studies of Adopted Children
• 6 The Accuracy of Secondary Sources
• 7 I.Q. In The Uterus
• Conclusion
• Author Index