by Lucy Crehan
Caveat 1: The test result was not to be interpreted as a permanent measure of a child’s ability, nor should they be taken to suggest anything about the child’s potential for future development. It gave a snapshot of how developed the child’s intelligence was compared to his peers at the time of measurement only.
Caveat 2: Comparisons should only be drawn between children of similar backgrounds. Differing experiences of children from different backgrounds were likely to affect their scores, and therefore the scores would reflect these experiences rather than any problems with their cognitive development.
Caveat 3: Testing should not be a one-off event, as individuals’ intellects develop at different rates, and a child who performed below his peers at one age may catch up with them at another, and vice versa.
In other words, they believed that intelligence was not something that is fixed but something that develops. ‘With practice, training, and above all method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.’111 This is a conclusion shared with modern intelligence researchers, including those who acknowledge intelligence to be partly heritable. For example, the geneticists Kathryn Asbury and Robert Plomin write that ‘environment plays a role in influencing IQ, and IQ alone does not predict achievement’.112
However, this early insight of Binet’s was lost to the world, and worse, his test was misused to further propagate ideas about intelligence that he completely disagreed with. Binet and Simon’s test was discovered by the Director of the Vineland Training School for Backward and Feeble-minded Children – Henry Goddard of New Jersey – on a trip to Europe. He initially dismissed the test as being overly simple, but then tried it on some of the children at his school, and was surprised and delighted by how well the scores correlated with his experiences of different degrees of ‘feeble-mindedness’ in the children.
Goddard believed that intelligence was ‘a unitary mental process… conditioned by a nervous system which is inborn... that is but little affected by any later influences’ – quite the opposite to Binet’s own understanding. Whereas Binet saw the results of a test as indicating a child’s current level of development compared to their same-age peers (because this is how he designed it), Goddard assumed and then espoused that the test identified something about the child that was not only stable over time, but inherited too.
This belief about intelligence being a fixed entity was not unique to Goddard but widely held at the time and, to Binet’s dismay, the test became a convenient tool for categorising and labelling children. Eugenics was popular in the United States even before his test made it across the Atlantic, which may explain why the idea of intelligence testing became so widespread once it got there. By 1964 (one year before the establishment of modern Singapore) about 60,000 people were subjected to compulsory sterilisation in the United States. Just fewer than half of these were sterilised on the basis of having a mental disability, and intelligence tests informed these diagnoses.
What is the truth about intelligence, then? Is it fixed or does it develop? Is it heritable or does it depend on your environment? How does it affect the ways we design education systems? And why am I still banging on about intelligence instead of writing about the Singaporean system? Enormous questions.
For a start, there is no one agreed definition of intelligence. Traditional intelligence tests measure IQ: general verbal and/or non-verbal cognitive ability. Some, such as the psychologist Howard Gardner, have a broader view of intelligence that includes more physical, practical and personal skills: something I will discuss in relation to British Columbia’s education system when we get to Canada. But for now, we will use the narrower definition taken by most researchers of the genetics of intelligence, that it is ‘general cognitive ability’ as measured by intelligence tests.
Let’s address the technical questions first. Here goes:
Intelligence is not fixed, it develops. Like height, your ‘general cognitive ability’ changes over time at a rate that depends partly on the environment you experience; you are more intelligent now than you were when you were seven (well, we would hope).
Intelligence is partly heritable. Like strength or height, the variability in intelligence in the population is partly explained by genes, and partly by the environment and their experiences; about half and half in the case of cognitive ability.113
So far this may seem to make sense. You might think (as I did) that it is the environmental influence that allows your intelligence to develop. But here’s the tricky bit. Even if IQ was 100 per cent heritable, and entirely determined by your genetics, intelligence would still develop – it is not a fixed trait. It seems intuitive that if intelligence has a genetic basis then you must have a fixed ‘amount’ of it, and that every time you measure it you should get the same result, but that is not the case. The confusion comes from a conflation of the concepts of intelligence and IQ – even if you are to define intelligence as narrowly as ‘what IQ tests measure’, there is a subtle but important distinction between the two.
It was another American, Lewis Terman, who cemented the popular but false idea that intelligence is fixed and stable – giving it legs long after the research showed otherwise. He did this by making famous the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ) as a measure of someone’s intelligence. Your IQ is not the same as your score in an intelligence test. To produce a child’s IQ score, you first calculate a child’s mental age by comparing their intelligence test score with the average scores for each age group. For example, if a seven-year-old, Justin, takes an intelligence test and scores 43/100, which is above the typical score for a seven-year-old and closer to the average score for a nine-year-old, Justin is said to have a mental age of nine, even though he is seven. To calculate his IQ score, you divide his mental age by his actual age, and, because Terman didn’t like decimals, you multiply your answer by 100.
IQ = mental age / chronological age x 100
Justin’s IQ = 9/7 x 100 = 129
Why does this matter? Because by including the ‘typical’ scores in the calculation, IQ stops being a measure of ‘general cognitive ability’, and becomes ‘general cognitive ability relative to the rest of the population’, or in the case of children, ‘relative to your age group’. The use of IQ as a proxy for intelligence is the reason so many people still think intelligence is fixed, despite evidence to the contrary.
To demonstrate this, let’s take the case of Justin’s sister Julie, who is six and just starting school. If we give Julie the same type of intelligence test now, then at ages 9, 12, and 15, we would see her test score increase every time: 23, 45, 65, 83. If we converted these four test scores into mental ages, they would also be increasing – if she is an ‘average’ child she will most likely have a mental age of 6, 9, 12, and 15 at each point. Both measures show that Julie’s intelligence, her general cognitive ability, is developing over time (though real children don’t necessarily develop in such a predictable way). But if we take the step of converting these scores into IQ scores, and divide her mental age by her actual age (and times by 100), suddenly her scores at each point become the same: 100, 100, 100, 100. Suddenly it looks like nothing is changing at all.
Julie’s average development:
Age: 6 9 12 15 Increasing
Scores: 23 45 65 83 Increasing
Mental age: 6 9 12 15 Increasing
IQ: 100 100 100 100 Stable
So Julie may have significantly developed her cognitive abilities between the ages of 9 and 12, she may be able to do all sorts of new things and solve harder problems than she could before, but because her rate of development was the same as the average and everyone else has developed too, her relative intelligence, or IQ, doesn’t change.
In addition, psychologists now dispute the idea that intelligence develops in a straightforward linear way as the concept of ‘mental age’ seems to suggest, and instead believe that intelligence develops in ‘intermittent burs
ts’ (just like growth spurts), which can happen at different times for different children. This makes it difficult to assess children for their ‘potential’ at a young age, as some may be developmentally ahead of their peers early on but then slow down, whereas others may have a shaky start but make accelerated progress later on. Variability of IQ in young children is due more to home environment than genetics.
One final point on intelligence before we move on; IQ and achievement are not the same thing. Geneticists Robert Plomin and Kathryn Asbury use a racing car analogy to explain this: equating IQ with achievement is like saying that the top spot in any motor racing contest will always go to the car with the biggest engine, irrespective of the skill or experience of the driver. IQ and achievement only correlate at 0.5, and ‘a great big chunk of school achievement is entirely independent of IQ’.114
Back to Singapore
Which brings us (finally) back to Singapore. The education system in Singapore is based on the concept of meritocracy: that is, it aims to identify talent in the young and give different opportunities to different children dependent on that talent. This system assumes that it is possible to accurately identify talent at the ages of 10 and 12,115 when the most significant streaming and selection into different schools take place, because it was built on ideas about the nature of intelligence that although popular at the time, have since been shown to be false.
Thinking and structures are slowly changing though. The downsides of streaming and school selection at this age have recently been debated in Singaporean parliament, with two MPs proposing that the government rethink the segregation of students according to their abilities.116
Moves have since been made to mitigate the effect of streaming, and the government is piloting a programme whereby students in the Normal Academic Stream will be able to take ‘Express’ level courses in the subjects they did well in at their PSLE. These moves are due to a recognition that streaming early can mean that late developers miss out on the chance to pursue dreams they are perfectly capable of achieving, because they weren’t ahead of the curve at age 10. I met one such late developer, who would have missed out on his dream job of becoming a teacher if it weren’t for him making a very bold move.
David Hoe is a thoughtful, passionate teacher trainee, and among many other accomplishments has set up a mentoring programme that matches current undergraduates with underprivileged children. He is passionate about all young people having opportunities, and understands better than most the effects that family life can have on early outcomes.
I’d arranged to meet David after reading about him in the newspaper. David had a difficult childhood. He lived in a one-room flat with his mother (his parents divorced when he was a toddler) who earned a living as a supermarket sales promoter. One day she went into hospital for a routine cataract operation, but became blind when the operation tragically went wrong. As Singapore has an extremely limited welfare system, she was reduced to selling tissues in public canteens, with seven-year-old David guiding her. The time David had to devote to caring for his mother had an impact on his studies, and when he took the PSLE at age 12, he got a low score, relegating him to the Normal Technical Stream for secondary school. David explained the implications of this, ‘What it really means is this. If you are “normal tech” (in the Normal Technical Stream) you are set for vocational training. If you go to ITE you probably don’t even think about going to university. At best, you think about going to polytechnic.’
The problem is, David wanted to be a teacher – a job for which you need to take O levels. David did work extremely hard at school, and with the help of some wonderful teachers and mentors, aced his N levels, getting some of the top scores in his year. But that still wasn’t enough; as a Normal Technical student it wasn’t possible for him to take O levels. So what did David do next? In a brave move for a teenage boy, he wrote to the then Minister for Education, and explained his situation. As a result, he was granted special permission to repeat Years 3 and 4 of secondary school, but in the Express Stream.
David is now on a teaching scholarship, having studied economics at the prestigious National University of Singapore, and is sure to make a brilliant teacher. But his success rather calls into question the ideas about talent that this stratified education system was built on. It calls into question the idea that a test taken at a young age is an accurate measure of your intelligence and future potential. Glass-half-full Singaporeans would say that David’s example shows that anyone can succeed in Singapore, if they try hard enough – but effort and intelligence are not the only things which make a difference to your chances.
Chapter 9: Private Tutors,
Public Pressure
Nobody owes you a living
Lee Kuan Yew
Many education systems are competitive, particularly Asian ones, as we shall see – but what is particularly interesting about Singapore is how the views about talent on which the system is based are at odds with the views of the population at large. The system is based on the idea of fixed intelligence, leading to early ‘identification’ of talent, but the largely Chinese-origin population believe that academic success is mainly down to effort and hard work, so many believe that their child can make it into that top stream, or top school, if they pull out all the stops and work really hard. Parental expectations and involvement are therefore high.
On my first trip to the local mall I saw a stall selling stacks of past exam papers from the local primary schools, going back several years. No one seemed to be behind the counter, but when I tried to take a photo, a small plump woman in a stripey dress ran out from the store next door waving her arms in front of my camera. I apologised, confused, and asked permission in advance the next time I saw such a stall in the next corridor of the mall. Once again, this was met with vigorous headshaking. I later learned that selling such tests is illegal and so doesn’t officially happen. In the same mall, and in every other mall in Singapore, the bookshop had an education section which took up about 50 per cent of its floor space. Children’s author Monica Lim told me over our coffee at the airport that every term, all the parents go with their children to the book store to buy practice books for all their subjects, and that it is totally normal for parents to set their children homework from these books once they’ve finished their school homework.
When parents have the money (even when it is scarce) they spend it on private tuition. Every day on my humid walk home from school, I walked past a tutorial centre, set up like a shop with a glass front allowing passers-by to see into the classroom. I was exhausted and sticky after a day of interviewing teachers and observing lessons, and pitied the nine-year-olds who were still studying having finished a full day at school themselves. Often there were still little people working when I came home from an evening out at 10pm. Not all Singaporean parents want to put their children through this, although some are proud of their kiasu status – a Singlish (Singapore English) word that means ‘fear of losing’. A friend of one of the parents I chatted to told her how determined he was to not be like this, and instead to give his child the space to be a child. A few months into the school year, though, he was looking for private tutors like everyone else. When the best opportunities for a good (financially secure) life are only given to the top-ranked students, and the parents of most children are buying private tuition, parents who aren’t comfortable with this model are left in a difficult position.
This means that unlike other countries that complain of grade inflation where it becomes easier over the years to get top grades, in Singapore they have the opposite problem. Exams are actually getting harder. Petunia Lee, organisational psychologist and mum of a 10-year-old son she refers to as ‘Little Boy’, writes in her blog:
I realized something odd about our primary school language textbooks today. The level of difficulty of the language printed in a Primary 5 textbook is about two years easier than the level of difficulty in the Primary 5 exams. After examining Little Boy’s Chinese textboo
k in detail (something I have never done because I had never found them useful in preparing Little Boy for the exams, and therefore intuitively ignored them), it occurred to me to ask myself why today. Why don’t I find school textbooks useful in preparing Little Boy for exams? Why did I spend years fighting with Grandma trying to get her to ignore the Chinese textbook when helping Little Boy with Chinese? And why was it that Grandma’s stubborn focus on the textbook produced a steady downward trend in Chinese grades?
A Limited Amount of Pie
This disparity between what is taught at school and what is in the exams puts further pressure on parents to fund private tuition, and further psychological pressure on the children to study harder than their peers. And due to this increased effort and extra tuition, each cohort does better than the last, leading the government to make exams even harder to differentiate between the top performers, and so the cycle continues. This is not just abstract, theoretical stuff, this is felt by children in their classrooms and at their kitchen tables.
On Petunia’s blog I also came across a wonderfully perceptive, although saddening, account of a conversation she (PL) had with her son (LB) on this topic. So, out of the mouth of babes:
LB: Mom, this happens [the exams are hard] because as different groups of students go through the educational system, children become better and better. Therefore, this forces the government to raise the standards of the PSLE.
PL: Yes... but where will it end? Maybe in 10 years’ time, PSLE students will need to do research in order to get into a good secondary school.
LB: That won’t happen Mom. It’s just like a bubble you know. It will burst one day…
PL: Hah? What? What’s that gotta do with your PSLE, eh?
LB: OK… the government will raise the standards of the PSLE. The PSLE bubble of skills and knowledge will get bigger and bigger and bigger. Then, when the students cannot take it anymore, they will all commit suicide. Then the PSLE bubble of skills and knowledge will pop and become smaller because the government will be forced to bring down standards… otherwise there would be no more children left. We would all have died. So, as long as you help me get through this, it will be ok. We can do it, Mom. And don’t worry about your Grandson because I think when that time comes, the bubble will have burst.