Binet also had a social motive for his reticence. He greatly feared that his practical device, if reified as an entity, could be perverted and used as an indelible label, rather than as a guide for identifying children who needed help. He worried that schoolmasters with “exaggerated zeal” might use IQ as a convenient excuse: “They seem to reason in the following way: ‘Here is an excellent opportunity for getting rid of all the children who trouble us,’ and without the true critical spirit, they designate all who are unruly, or disinterested in the school” (1905, p. 169). But he feared even more what has since been called the “self-fulfilling prophesy.” A rigid label may set a teacher’s attitude and eventually divert a child’s behavior into a predicted path:
It is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individual when one is forewarned. This would be to operate as the graphologists did who, when Dreyfus was believed to be guilty, discovered in his handwriting signs of a traitor or a spy” (1905, p. 170).
Not only did Binet decline to label IQ as inborn intelligence; he also refused to regard it as a general device for ranking all pupils according to mental worth. He devised his scale only for the limited purpose of his commission by the ministry of education: as a practical guide for identifying children whose poor performance indicated a need for special education—those who we would today call learning disabled or mildly retarded. Binet wrote (1908, p. 263): “We are of the opinion that the most valuable use of our scale will not be its application to the normal pupils, but rather to those of inferior grades of intelligence.” As to the causes of poor performance, Binet refused to speculate. His tests, in any case, could not decide (1905, p. 37):
Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded. We should therefore study his condition at the time and that only. We have nothing to do either with his past history or with his future; consequently, we shall neglect his etiology, and we shall make no attempt to distinguish between acquired and congenital idiocy.… As to that which concerns his future, we shall exercise the same abstinence; we do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis, and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improvable. We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state.
But of one thing Binet was sure: whatever the cause of poor performance in school, the aim of his scale was to identify in order to help and improve, not to label in order to limit. Some children might be innately incapable of normal achievement, but all could improve with special help.
The difference between strict hereditarians and their opponents is not, as some caricatures suggest, the belief that a child’s performance is all inborn or all a function of environment and learning. I doubt that the most committed antihereditarians have ever denied the existence of innate variation among children. The differences are more a matter of social policy and educational practice. Hereditarians view their measures of intelligence as markers of permanent, inborn limits. Children, so labeled, should be sorted, trained according to their inheritance and channeled into professions appropriate for their biology. Mental testing becomes a theory of limits. Antihereditarians, like Binet, test in order to identify and help. Without denying the evident fact that not all children, whatever their training, will enter the company of Newton and Einstein, they emphasize the power of creative education to increase the achievements of all children, often in extensive and unanticipated ways. Mental testing becomes a theory for enhancing potential through proper education.
Binet spoke eloquently of well-meaning teachers, caught in the unwarranted pessimism of their invalid hereditarian assumptions (1909, pp. 16–17):
As I know from experience, … they seem to admit implicitly that in a class where we find the best, we must also find the worst, and that this is a natural and inevitable phenomenon, with which a teacher must not become preoccupied, and that it is like the existence of rich and poor within a society. What a profound error.
How can we help a child if we label him as unable to achieve by biological proclamation?
If we do nothing, if we don’t intervene actively and usefully, he will continue to lose time … and will finally become discouraged. The situation is very serious for him, and since his is not an exceptional case (since children with defective comprehension are legion), we might say that it is a serious question for all of us and for all of society. The child who loses the taste for work in class strongly risks being unable to acquire it after he leaves school (1909, p. 100).
Binet railed against the motto “stupidity is for a long time” (“quand on est bete, c’est pour longtemps”), and upbraided teachers who “are not interested in students who lack intelligence. They have neither sympathy nor respect for them, and their intemperate language leads them to say such things in their presence as ‘This is a child who will never amount to anything … he is poorly endowed … he is not intelligent at all.’ How often have I heard these imprudent words” (1909, p. 100). Binet then cites an episode in his own baccalaureate when one examiner told him that he would never have a “true” philosophical spirit: “Never! What a momentous word. Some recent thinkers seem to have given their moral support to these deplorable verdicts by affirming that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded upon nothing” (1909, p. 101).
The children identified by Binet’s test were to be helped, not indelibly labeled. Binet had definite pedagogical suggestions, and many were implemented. He believed, first of all, that special education must be tailored to the individual needs of disadvantaged children: it must be based on “their character and their aptitudes, and on the necessity for adapting ourselves to their needs and their capacities” (1909, p. 15). Binet recommended small classrooms of fifteen to twenty students, compared with sixty to eighty then common in public schools catering to poor children. In particular, he advocated special methods of education, including a program that he called “mental orthopedics”:
What they should learn first is not the subjects ordinarily taught, however important they may be; they should be given lessons of will, of attention, of discipline; before exercises in grammar, they need to be exercised in mental orthopedics; in a word they must learn how to learn (1908, p. 257).
Binet’s interesting program of mental orthopedics included a set of physical exercises designed to improve, by transfer to mental functioning, the will, attention, and discipline that Binet viewed as prerequisites for studying academic subjects. In one, called “l’exercise des statues,” and designed to increase attention span, children moved vigorously until told to adopt and retain an immobile position. (I played this game as a kid in the streets of New York; we also called it “statues.”) Each day the period of immobility would be increased. In another, designed to improve speed, children filled a piece of paper with as many dots as they could produce in the allotted time.
Binet spoke with pleasure about the success of his special classrooms (1909, p. 104) and argued that pupils so benefited had not only increased their knowledge, but their intelligence as well. Intelligence, in any meaningful sense of the word, can be augmented by good education; it is not a fixed and inborn quantity:
It is in this practical sense, the only one accessible to us, that we say that the intelligence of these children has been increased. We have increased what constitutes the intelligence of a pupil: the capacity to learn and to assimilate instruction.
The dismantling of Binet’s intentions in America
In summary, Binet insisted upon three cardinal principles for using his tests. All his caveats were later disregarded, and his intentions overturned, by the American hereditarians who translated his scale into written form as a routine device for testing all children.
1. The scores are a practical device; they do not buttress any th
eory of intellect. They do not define anything innate or permanent. We may not designate what they measure as “intelligence” or any other reified entity.
2. The scale is a rough, empirical guide for identifying mildly retarded and learning-disabled children who need special help. It is not a device for ranking normal children.
3. Whatever the cause of difficulty in children identified for help, emphasis shall be placed upon improvement through special training. Low scores shall not be used to mark children as innately incapable.
If Binet’s principles had been followed, and his tests consistently used as he intended, we would have been spared a major misuse of science in our century. Ironically, many American school boards have come full cycle, and now use IQ tests only as Binet originally recommended: as instruments for assessing children with specific learning problems. Speaking personally, I feel that tests of the IQ type were helpful in the proper diagnosis of my own learning-disabled son. His average score, the IQ itself, meant nothing, for it was only an amalgam of some very high and very low scores; but the pattern of low values indicated his areas of deficit.
The misuse of mental tests is not inherent in the idea of testing itself. It arises primarily from two fallacies, eagerly (so it seems) embraced by those who wish to use tests for the maintenance of social ranks and distinctions: reification and hereditarianism. The next chapter shall treat reification—the assumption that test scores represent a single, scalable thing in the head called general intelligence.
The hereditarian fallacy is not the simple claim that IQ is to some degree “heritable.” I have no doubt that it is, though the degree has clearly been exaggerated by the most avid hereditarians. It is hard to find any broad aspect of human performance or anatomy that has no heritable component at all. The hereditarian fallacy resides in two false implications drawn from this basic fact:
1. The equation of “heritable” with “inevitable.” To a biologist, heritability refers to the passage of traits or tendencies along family lines as a result of genetic transmission. It says little about the range of environmental modification to which these traits are subject. In our vernacular, “inherited” often means “inevitable.” But not to a biologist. Genes do not make specific bits and pieces of a body; they code for a range of forms under an array of environmental conditions. Moreover, even when a trait has been built and set, environmental intervention may still modify inherited defects. Millions of Americans see normally through lenses that correct innate deficiencies of vision. The claim that IQ is so-many percent “heritable” does not conflict with the belief that enriched education can increase what we call, also in the vernacular, “intelligence.” A partially inherited low IQ might be subject to extensive improvement through proper education. And it might not. The mere fact of its heritability permits no conclusion.
2. The confusion of within- and between-group heredity. The major political impact of hereditarian theories does not arise from the inferred heritability of tests, but from a logically invalid extension. Studies of the heritability of IQ, performed by such traditional methods as comparing scores of relatives, or contrasting scores of adopted children with both their biological and legal parents, are all of the “within-group” type—that is, they permit an estimate of heritability within a single, coherent population (white Americans, for example). The common fallacy consists in assuming that if heredity explains a certain percentage of variation among individuals within a group, it must also explain a similar percentage of the difference in average IQ between groups—whites and blacks, for example. But variation among individuals within a group and differences in mean values between groups are entirely separate phenomena. One item provides no license for speculation about the other.
A hypothetical and noncontroversial example will suffice. Human height has a higher heritability than any value ever proposed for IQ. Take two separate groups of males. The first, with an average height of 5 feet 10 inches, live in a prosperous American town. The second, with an average height of 5 feet 6 inches, are starving in a third-world village. Heritability is 95 percent or so in each place—meaning only that relatively tall fathers tend to have tall sons and relatively short fathers short sons. This high within-group heritability argues neither for nor against the possibility that better nutrition in the next generation might raise the average height of third-world villagers above that of prosperous Americans. Likewise, IQ could be highly heritable within groups, and the average difference between whites and blacks in America might still only record the environmental disadvantages of blacks.
I have often been frustrated with the following response to this admonition: “Oh well, I see what you mean, and you’re right in theory. There may be no necessary connection in logic, but isn’t it more likely all the same that mean differences between groups would have the same causes as variation within groups.” The answer is still “no.” Within- and between-group heredity are not tied by rising degrees of probability as heritability increases within groups and differences enlarge between them. The two phenomena are simply separate. Few arguments are more dangerous than the ones that “feel” right but can’t be justified.
Alfred Binet avoided these fallacies and stuck by his three principles. American psychologists perverted Binet’s intention and invented the hereditarian theory of IQ. They reified Binet’s scores, and took them as measures of an entity called intelligence. They assumed that intelligence was largely inherited, and developed a series of specious arguments confusing cultural differences with innate properties. They believed that inherited IQ scores marked people and groups for an inevitable station in life. And they assumed that average differences between groups were largely the products of heredity, despite manifest and profound variation in quality of life.
This chapter analyzes the major works of the three pioneers of hereditarianism in America: H. H. Goddard, who brought Binet’s scale to America and reified its scores as innate intelligence; L. M. Terman, who developed the Stanford-Binet scale, and dreamed of a rational society that would allocate professions by IQ scores; and R. M. Yerkes, who persuaded the army to test 1.75 million men in World War I, thus establishing the supposedly objective data that vindicated hereditarian claims and led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, with its low ceiling for lands suffering the blight of poor genes.
The hereditarian theory of IQ is a home-grown American product. If this claim seems paradoxical for a land with egalitarian traditions, remember also the jingoistic nationalism of World War I, the fear of established old Americans facing a tide of cheap (and sometimes politically radical) labor immigrating from southern and eastern Europe, and above all our persistent, indigenous racism.
H. H. Goddard and the menace of the feeble-minded
Intelligence as a Mendelian gene
GODDARD IDENTIFIES THE MORON
It remains now for someone to determine the nature of feeble-mindedness and complete the theory of the intelligence quotient.
—H. H. GODDARD, 1917, in a review of Terrnan, 1916
Taxonomy is always a contentious issue because the world does not come to us in neat little packages. The classification of mental deficiency aroused a healthy debate early in our century. Two categories of a tripartite arrangement won general acceptance: idiots could not develop full speech and had mental ages below three; imbeciles could not master written language and ranged from three to seven in mental age. (Both terms are now so entrenched in the vernacular of invectives that few people recognize their technical status in an older psychology.) Idiots and imbeciles could be categorized and separated to the satisfaction of most professionals, for their affliction was sufficiently severe to warrant a diagnosis of true pathology. They are not like us.
But consider the nebulous and more threatening realm of “high-grade defectives”—the people who could be trained to function in society, the ones who established a bridge between pathology and normality and thereby threatened the taxonomic edifice. These people, with mental ages o
f eight to twelve, were called débile (or weak) by the French. Americans and Englishmen usually called them “feeble-minded,” a term mired in hopeless ambiguity because other psychologists used feeble-minded as a generic term for all mental defectives, not just those of high grade.
Taxonomists often confuse the invention of a name with the solution of a problem. H. H. Goddard, the energetic and crusading director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey, made this crucial error. He devised a name for “high-grade” defectives, a word that became entrenched in our language through a series of jokes that rivaled the knock-knock or elephant jokes of other generations. The metaphorical whiskers on these jokes are now so long that most people would probably grant an ancient pedigree to the name. But Goddard invented the word in our century. He christened these people “morons,” from a Greek word meaning foolish.
Goddard was the first popularizer of the Binet scale in America. He translated Binet’s articles into English, applied his tests, and agitated for their general use. He agreed with Binet that the tests worked best in identifying people just below the normal range—Goddard’s newly christened morons. But the resemblance between Binet and Goddard ends there. Binet refused to define his scores as “intelligence,” and wished to identify in order to help. Goddard regarded the scores as measures of a single, innate entity. He wished to identify in order to recognize limits, segregate, and curtail breeding to prevent further deterioration of an endangered American stock, threatened by immigration from without and by prolific reproduction of its feeble-minded within.
A UNILINEAR SCALE OF INTELLIGENCE
The attempt to establish a unilinear classification of mental deficiency, a rising scale from idiots to imbeciles to morons, embodies two common fallacies pervading most theories of biological determinism discussed in this book: the reification of intelligence as a single, measurable entity; and the assumption, extending back to Morton’s skulls (pp.82–101) and forward to Jensen’s universal scaling of general intelligence (pp. 347–350), that evolution is a tale of unilinear progress, and that a single scale ascending from primitive to advanced represents the best way of ordering variation. The concept of progress is a deep prejudice with an ancient pedigree (Bury, 1920) and a subtle power, even over those who would deny it explicitly (Nisbet, 1980).
The Mismeasure of Man Page 19