Eugenics, IQ and the 11+

A recent conversation with a journalist about the, ahem, legacy of a former schools minister in England reminded me of a chapter I wrote over a decade ago for my Routledge title, Why Do I Need a Teacher When I've got Google? .

It described the origins of the IQ test, how it has been (mis)appropriated over the last century and its influence on genetics, eugenics, education, the 11+ and worse.

With a third edition of the book on the horizon and many of the issues it touches still swilling around the edusphere, I thought it might be useful to share an edited extract.

The chapter goes on to discuss the importance of EQ (Emotional Intelligence) over IQ when it comes to humans achieving their potential but, for this blog, let's just look at our understanding of intelligence and what that means for education.

So, grab a cuppa and see what you think...

Chapter 6

Your EQ Will Take You Further Than Your IQ

At the turn of the last century a self-taught Parisian psychologist named Alfred Binet and his colleague Theodore (or Henri, depending on which source you read) Simon were working with children in the Paris school system at the request of the French government. Their purpose was:

‘…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.’

Beyond Hope

Their major task was to try and work out which of the children who were faring poorly in the French school system but could be saved and which ones were, educationally-speaking, beyond hope.

This latter group, according to Binet writing in 1905, included the ‘unstable’, ‘moral imbeciles’, the ‘insane’ including all those with ‘decaying sanity’ (that is to say less intelligence now than when they started, a group that included ‘many epileptics‘,) ‘degenerates’ and ‘idiots’.

Interestingly he is at pains to point out the need for ‘great delicacy’ when deciding between children who are ‘unstable’ and those who simply have ‘rebellious dispositions’.

After all, the symptoms - ‘turbulent, vicious, rebellious to all discipline; they lack sequence of ideas, and probably power of attention’ - are the same.

As he points out in his paper New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals:

‘We have insisted upon the necessity of instructors not treating as unstable… those children whose character is not sympathetic with their own.’

The Binet-Simon test they devised involved taking a sample of children whom their teachers had identified as ‘average’ and then comparing the target child against children of the same age.

Subnormal

Any difference of more than two years was deemed to be ‘subnormal’ and meant the child was in need of remedial help.

The process by which the children were assessed consisted of ‘medical’, ‘pedagogical’ and ‘psychological’ methods, the latter of which included 30 different tests of increasing complexity.

This third element was not designed to create a measure of intelligence because intelligence ‘cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured’ but rather ‘a measuring scale of intelligence’, comparing children of similar age, a scale ‘to determine to what degrees of the scale idiocy, imbecility, and moronity correspond’.

I list the 30 tests below not just for historical interest but also to underline the extent to which intelligence testing today, and with it our own view of what clever is, are so influenced by this century-old work: 

1. ‘Le Regard’ i.e. ‘to follow with his eyes a moving object’
2. Prehension Provoked by a Tactile Stimulus
3. Prehension Provoked by a Visual Perception
4. Recognition of Food
5. Quest of Food Complicated by a Slight Mechanical Difficulty
6. Execution of Simple Commands and Imitation of Simple Gestures
7. Verbal Knowledge of Objects
8. Verbal Knowledge of Pictures
9. Naming of Designated Objects
10. Immediate Comparison of Two Lines of Unequal Lengths
11. Repetition of Three Figures
12. Comparison of Two Weights
13. Suggestibility
14. Verbal Definition of Known Objects
15. Repetition of Sentences of 15 Words
16. Comparison of Known Objects from Memory
17. Exercise of Memory on Pictures
18. Drawing a Design from Memory
19. Immediate Repetition of Figure
20. Resemblances of Several Known Objects Given from Memory
21. Comparison of Length
22. Five Weights to be Placed in Order
23. Gap in Weights
24. Exercise upon Rhymes
25. Verbal Gaps to be Filled
26. Synthesis of Three Words in One Sentence
27. Reply to an Abstract Question
28. Reversal of the Hands of a Clock
29. Paper Cutting
30. Definitions of Abstract Terms

I particularly like Binet’s written instructions for administering number 24. Once it has been pointed out that examples of rhyme are the way in which ‘compote’ rhymes with ‘carotte’ and ‘ baton’ rhymes with both ‘macaron’ and ‘citron’, children should then be asked:

‘Do you now understand what a rhyme is? Very well, you must find all the rhymes you can. The word with which you must find rhymes is 'obéissance' Come, begin, find some.’

Perhaps it was the child who passed the test who asked the examiner why he got all the easy ones.

The Remarkable Diversity of Intelligence

For our purposes it is well worth listing in full what the Frenchman knew about his work, his methods and the nature of intelligence as a whole according to the Indiana University School of Education’s website Human Intelligence, citing a 1992 article by R.S. Siegler entitled 'The Other Alfred Binet'. 

What’s more, the following is especially ironic given what became of his work when it was adopted and adapted in the US and beyond in the years after his death:

‘Binet was upfront about the limitations of his scale. He stressed the remarkable diversity of intelligence and the subsequent need to study it using qualitative as opposed to quantitative measures. Binet also stressed that intellectual development progressed at variable rates, could be impacted by the environment and was therefore not based solely on genetics, was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be used on children with comparable backgrounds.’

In other words – and I am repeating this to make sure I have understood what Binet meant as it makes me furious just typing this – over 100 years ago we knew that intelligence testing is limited; there is more than one way to be intelligent; we need to look at the qualities of intelligence, not the quantities; we develop at different rates even though we have the same birthdays; the environment into which we are born and in which we live will have an affect on how intelligent we end up; intelligence is not determined at – or before – birth; it is not fixed; people can become more intelligent and, if you are going to compare children, at least compare like with like.

Anthropologist Stanley Grant once said,

‘If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilisation would presumably flunk it’.

If we knew all of the limitations of such intelligence testing in 1905, how did we end up following the shaky concept of IQ down the blind alley that it is?

Filtering Out the 'Feeble-Minded'

Eugenics plays a part.

In 1910 Binet’s test were translated into English by the American eugenicist Henry Goddard who wanted a way of filtering out the ‘feeble-minded’ from American society.

Like the Englishman and cousin to Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton before him, he believed that intelligence, and related defects therein, was hereditary and therefore breeding was at the heart of any attempt to raise a nation’s overall intelligence.

For Galton, this entailed mating the clever people together, namely the well-off and well-educated.

For Goddard the key was to stop the stupid people breeding and if, regrettably, forcible sterilisation was not palatable to the American people the least they could do was to put them in ‘colonies’ .

Don’t worry, though as, according to Goddard, ‘segregation and colonization is not by any means as hopeless a plan as it may seem to those who look only at the immediate increase in the tax rate.’

He claimed that such a capital investment would be more than recompensed by the savings in almshouses, prisons, psychiatric hospitals and ‘the reduction in the annual loss in property and life due to these irresponsible people’. 

In Great Britain in 1907, The Eugenics Education Society was created to spearhead a campaign to have eugenicist views more widely accepted and, as quoted in The Making of Intelligence by Ken Richardson, a book I would make compulsory for all teachers, even the Encyclopaedia Britannica waded in, with one contributor asserting as fact that,

'It is cruel to the individual, it serves no social purpose, to drag a man of only moderate intellectual power from the hand-working to the brain-working group.’

According to Richardson, the campaign led in no small way to the hugely influential 1938 Spens Report – 'The Report of
The Consultative Committee on Secondary Education With Special Reference To Grammar Schools And Technical High Schools' - in which it was stated:

‘Intellectual development during childhood appears to progress as if it were governed by a single central factor, usually known as 'general intelligence', which may be broadly described as innate all-round intellectual ability. It appears to enter into everything which the child attempts to think, or say, or do, and seems on the whole to be the most important factor in determining his work in the classroom. Our psychological witnesses assured us that it can be measured approximately by means of intelligence tests.’

The report goes on to declare,

‘We were informed that, with few exceptions, it is possible at a very early age to predict with some degree of accuracy the ultimate level of a child's intellectual powers’ before concluding that, given the evidence, ‘Different children from the age of 11, if justice is to be done to their varying capacities, require types of education varying in certain important respects’.

Innate

The principle ‘psychological witness’ to which the report refers is the controversial English educational psychologist Cyril Burt, whose later research has been equally controversially discredited.

Burt was a member of the British Eugenics Society (as the Eugenics Education Society had become in 1926) and was the author of a 1909 paper which, according to Wikipedia at least, concluded that ‘upper-class children in private preparatory schools did better in the tests than those in the ordinary elementary schools, and that the difference was innate’.

In his 1963 report ‘Is Intelligence Distributed Normally?’, on the subject of the normal curve of distribution of intelligence, he stated that:

‘Subsequent work in genetics has since furnished strong theoretical grounds for believing that innate mental abilities are not distributed in exact conformity with the normal curve. So far as they are inborn, individual differences in general intelligence are apparently due to a large number of genes of varying influence.’

Compare that with this more scientifically-enlightened quote from a 21st century professor Robert Winston:

‘The kind of child you have depends almost entirely on how you bring it up. Genes and inherited dispositions are pieces of trivia really’.

[...]

[What] Binet was trying to prove [was that] intelligence was malleable – if we teach children to be cleverer then they will be cleverer.

Isn’t that the point of education in the first place?

Eugenics and the 11+

What’s more, Binet was adamant that his tests were not a test of potential but a way of taking a snapshot of an individual’s mental faculties at the time of the test.

As he declared in 'New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals', his aim was to assess simply whether the child was ‘normal or retarded’ and that was all:

‘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; …. We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state.’

The eugenics-influenced Spens Report is a very interesting, wide-ranging and thorough overview of the state of education and children’s development that had far-reaching implications, the reverberations of which are still sounding throughout the UK today.

For example, one of its recommendations was what became the ‘11+’:

‘We believe that the examination is capable of selecting in a high proportion of cases those pupils who quite certainly have so much intelligence and intelligence of such a character that without doubt they ought to receive a secondary education of the grammar school type, and also those pupils who quite certainly would not benefit from such an education.’

So, as a result of the works and influence of people like Galton and Goddard, we ended up with the 11+, secondary moderns, a selective two-tier school system and a lot of people with chips on their shoulders who feel they were made to feel like failures at the age of 11*.

However, it could have been worse.

In his 1913 publication, The Kallikak Family:
A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, in the chapter entitled ‘What Is To Be Done’ you can discern a certain frustration in Goddard’s tone when he writes:

‘For the low-grade idiot, the loathsome unfortunate that may be seen in our institutions, some have proposed the lethal chamber. But humanity is steadily tending away from the possibility of that method, and there is no probability that it will ever be practiced.’

20 years after the publication of Godard’s work, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was passed in Nazi Germany. 400,000 people were subsequently sterilised against their will and a further 2750,00 killed under Hitler’s personal ‘T4’ programme in which, in Hitler’s own words:

‘Patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death.’

Terman's Termites

In 1916 a psychologist (and another eugenicist) from Stanford University named Lewis Terman adapted Binet’s original process and concepts, adding further elements to the test and creating what became known as the Stanford–Binet test, essentially the ‘IQ Test’ we have today.

Building on the success of this test, in 1921 he set about a remarkable longitudinal study entitled 'Genetic Studies of Genius', a project that is still running.

In it he identified 1470 children who had high IQs  - and therefore, obviously, great potential - who he then tracked, tested and analysed for the rest of his life, starting a project that will continue until the last one either pulls out or dies.

These people became known as his ‘Termites’.

What did Terman learn?

According to Malcolm Gladwell in his enlightening, if a little repetitive book, Outliers, Terman wrote in the fourth volume of the study:

‘We have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.’

Terman’s Termites went on to have good lives, but not extraordinary ones.

There were a few who ended up as judges or politicians and they earned good salaries on the whole but, as Gladwell points out, ‘not that good’.

But then, the group were predominantly white, middle and upper-class Californians born between 1900 and 1925 whose parents were often Terman’s university staff colleagues, none of whom came from ‘private, parochial (religious) or Chinese schools’ as one later report pointed out.

With that sort of background, it would be hard for them not to do quite well. 

What is of huge ironic interest to the anti-eugenicists is the fact that none of the children whose ‘genius’ was predicted by the IQ testing went on to win a Nobel prize.

Two Nobel Prizes and the Repository for Germinal Choice

However, not one but two children whose Terman’s IQ filtering process eliminated did.

Louis Alvarez won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968 but is best known as the man behind the ‘impact theory’ of dinosaur extinction. William Shockley, whose work paved the way for Silicon Valley (not to mention whose report to the US War Department paved the way for the use of the atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima) was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956.

In a double irony, Shockley himself was a particularly controversial eugenicist in later life with views on sterilisation, race and the heritability of intelligence that made him very unpopular in many quarters.

He was also a high profile donor to the Repository for Germinal Choice – the ‘Nobel Prize sperm bank’. 

In 1974 a smaller scale but similar study to Terman’s was begun on 70 children in the UK, trying to identify why certain children were labeled as gifted and others not.

Although still ongoing, a 2006 report states that: 

‘a gifted childhood has not always delivered outstanding adult success. Better predictive factors were hard work, emotional support and a positive, open, personal outlook.’

In other words, what we often take for ‘genius’, as Gladwell joyously points out, supported by the report above, is more often than not cleverness backed up by an awful lot of hard work.

Yes, there is a certain amount of heredity involved in how intelligent you are but nothing that good parenting and a good education (as opposed to a mediocre or damaging schooling) can’t influence significantly. [ITL]

There's plenty on the societal impact of grammar schools, in another of my books, The Working Class.

You can order a copy from the Independent Thinking Press website with 20% off and free UK p+p using the code 'ITL20'.