BIGOTOCRACY: THE BIGOTED HISTORY OF "STANDARDIZED TESTING"
- In 1904, conservative French politicians worried about the costs of training "the mentally
retarded". So Alfred Binet (1857-1911), director of the psychology department at the SORBONNE
in Paris, was asked to devise a test that might SEPARATE OUT THOSE WHOM TRAINING MIGHT BENEFIT. Binet
wrote, in 1908, "We are of the opinion that the most valuable use of our scale will not be its application
to the normal students, but rather to those of inferior grades of intelligence." (The Mismeasure
of Man, Stephen Jay Gould, W. W. Norton, 1981, p. 152.) So "intelligence testing" began as
"lack-of-intelligence testing".
- Binet devised such a test. But a disturbing problem for male spectators arose. GIRLS CONSISTENTLY
ACHIEVED HIGHER SCORES ON THESE TESTS THAN BOYS. In the detailed biography, Alfred Binet, by T.
H. Young, Chicago U. Press, 1973, we read that Binet manipulated the test-form for years until BOYS
SCORED CONSISTENTLY HIGHER THAN GIRLS. (Note: A "dependence on language" would explain the first results.
Girls are thought to have better hearing than boys, so learn language better than boys.) Thus, the
one characteristic (language) that many say makes us HUMAN was discriminated against in favor of the apparently
superior "spatial-sense" of males -- a property needed for the cave-man and hunter, but not the citizen.
- In 1911, Binet specifically wrote that "intelligence" should not be treated as a SINGLE, SCALABLE
ENTITY SUCH AS HEIGHT: "We feel it necessary to insist upon this fact because later, for the sake of
simplicity of statement, we will speak of a child of 8 years as having the intelligence of a child of
7 or 9 years; these expressions, if accepted arbitrarily, may give place to illusions." He also
feared that teachers would use such a test score to get rid of "all children children who trouble us".
(Gould, p. 151.) But generations of psychometricians have decided that Binet didn't know what he
was talking about.
- Binet's testing was brought to America (by or before 1913) by H. H. Goddard, director of the Vineland Training
School for Feeble-Minded (sic) Girls and Boys in New Jersey. (Goddard coined the word "moron".) His avowed
purpose was to deal with dangers to "American stock, threatened by immigration from without and by prolific
rewproduction of its feeble-minded from within" (Gould, p. 159). (1913, "The Binet tests in relation to iimigration",
H. H. Goddard, Journal of Psycho-Ascenics 18: 105-7. 1917, "Mental tests and the immigrant", Goddard, Journal
of Delinquency, 2: 243-77.)
- In 1913, Goddard sent two young women to Ellis Island with instructions "to pick out the feeble-minded by
sight, a task Goddard preferred to assign to women, to whom he granted innately human intuition" (Gould, p. 165),
The women then tested 35 Jews, 22 Hungarians, 50 Italians, 45 Russians. "Binet tests on the four groups led to an
astonishing result: 83% of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians, 87% of the Russians were feeble-minded
-- that is, below age twelve on the Binet scale ." (Gould, p. 166). But, Gould notes, these were "frightened men
and women, who speak no English and who have just endured an ocean voyage in steerage ... [mostly] poor ... never
gone to school; many had never held a pen or pencil in their hand ... ask[ed] to reproduce on paper a figure shown
a moment ago, but now withdrawn from their sight." (Gould, p. 166) How do you think you would do on such a test
under such conditions?
- Goddard later (1828) reversed himself in "Feeblemindedness: a question of definition", Journal of Psycho-Ascenics,
33: 219-227. On p. 224 of this paper, Goddard says, "I think I have gone over to the enemy."
- In 1916, Lewis M. Terman, professor at Stanford University, xxx, CA, revised the Binet Test, giving it the name
henceforth applied, "The Stanford-Binet IQ Test". Gould, p. 181: "Terman virtually closed professions of prestige and monetary
reward to people with IQ below 100". Gould, p. 188: "Terman's empirical work measured what statisticians call 'the within-group
variance' of IQ -- that is, the defferences in scores witiin single populations (all children in a school, for example). At
best he was able to show that children testing well or poorly at a young age generally maintain their ordering with respect
to other children as the population grows up....Terman took the hereditarian line on race and class ... [d]espite a poor
correlation of 0.4 between social status and IQ."
- Testing became a multimillion-dollar industry. Gould, p. 177: "The invalid argument runs: we know that the Stanford-Binet
measures intelligence; therefor, any written test that correlates strongly with Stanford-Binet also measures intelligence."
(To argue with this thesis is to call in question you own intelligence!)
- Not every one was so fooled by the tests as to be blinded to the bigotry. Walter Lippmann became in journalism what
Walter Kronkite became in TV news. In 1922, Lippmann wrote, "The danger of the intelligence tests is that in a wholesale system
of education, the less sophisticated or the more prejudiced will stop when they have classified and forget that their duty
is to educate. They will grade the retarded child instead of fighting the causes of his backwardness. For the whole drift
of the propaganda based on intelligence testing is to treat people with low intelligence quotients as congenitally and
hopelessly inferior." ("The Lippmann-Terman Debate" in The IQ Controversy, Eds., N. J. Block, G. Dworkin, Pantheon
Books, 1976, pp. 4-44.)
- Mass-testing really began in 1917 when R. M. Yerkes of Harvard University teamed with Goddard, Terman, and others at
Goddard's Vineland School to write "mental tests" for the United States Army, now that America had entered World War I.
Primary was "The Army Alpha Test". Illiterates and those failing the Alpha took a "Beta Test". Gould, p.195: "Binet's purpose