The Dark Roots of IQ Testing and How They Shaped the System of American Education

September 20, 2022

It is simply not possible to write an ENTIRE history of IQ testing in one article, so consider this a highly abridged overview, with massive gaping holes, to pique your interest and investigate further.

I highly recommend The Big Test by Nicholas Lemann; Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields and this article.

For context, and for more about the one decent man in the dark history of mental testing, you can read about Alfred Binet: This French Psychologist Created the First IQ Test to Help Young Students; Then It Got Into the Hands of an American Eugenicist.

Original art of Alfred Binet by Edwina White

We live in a society whose systems were designed with a subjective view of superiority and inferiority, and often based on psychometrics claiming to be unbiased.

As humans, we are innately driven to make sense of things, to look for patterns in nature, and to organize information in meaningful ways. We are compelled to categorize, classify, route, sort, and create structures of hierarchy.

This seemingly objective system of categorization is, well, highly subjective.

And it is within this subjective system that social scientists and psychologists of the past were driven to name objective mental functions, so that we could apply the results and create like-minded systems to structure the daily realms inside which we all operate: education, business, politics, law, medicine, and society.

In 1753, Carl Linnaeus (also known as Carl von Linne), a Swedish biologist, designed a universal and hierarchical system for the classification of all living things, starting with the largest category: All Life on Earth, nesting each lower domain inside the larger one, and ending with the smallest category: Species.

Over a century later, in 1905, the French psychologist Alfred Binet, who was born in France in 1857, would create a test that inadvertently kick-started another form of hierarchical classification: intelligence and race.

Had he foreseen the subversion of the test he created with the best intentions, he might have constructed his test differently or made something else.

Binet, who would become the foremost psychologist in mental development, served as the director of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne from 1895-1911.

It was the 1882 passage of Jules Ferry Laws, which mandated that all children, no matter their mental or physical differences, be included and attend public school, that led to the creation of the first modern intelligence test.

Alfred Binet / GETTY IMAGES

As I wrote in an earlier piece the Jules Ferry Laws had an unintended consequence. By requiring that all children, no matter their capacity, attend school, the imbalance was created in the classroom.

Teachers were struggling, and they didn’t know how to teach uniformly when some students couldn’t comprehend basic math and others were zipping through equations.

Something had to be done, but what, and more importantly—how?

The government assembled a special commission of experts to help sort out this conundrum.

One of those experts was Alfred Binet.

Binet believed that people developed at different rates, and that there wasn’t only one way to learn or one way to teach. He held a deep conviction that one’s environment influenced their intellectual development.

As Minister of Public Education, Binet was dedicated to designing a test that would help identify those children who needed extra attention and help. Binet was clear that the results of his test were not to be used to elevate those with the best scores and devalue those who receive low scores.

He was fiercely demonstrative in his belief that intelligence was not genetic, or fixed, and could not—should not—be assessed using quantitative measures. Binet argued that all conditions must be considered, and that testing must account for all variables.

The test was, he insisted, only to be used to identify children with cognitive challenges, so that they could be helped and treated. This was why Binet sought to develop a test to gauge real abilities & practical judgments.

"The Binet-Simon Intelligence Test," which was developed with the help of his collaborator, Theodore Simon, comprised 30 subtests to assess a variety of mental capabilities.

As a psychologist and the co-designer of these tests, Binet was acutely aware that IQ tests were inadequate measures for intelligence, so much so that he pointedly stressed the test's inability to properly measure creativity or emotional intelligence.

He repeatedly reinforced the purpose and mission of the scale, which was to identify students who could benefit from additional attention and services in schools.

So this test was scored by calculating “mental age.” If someone scored as well as a 14-year-old, then they would have the mental age of 14, no matter their actual age.

Binet consistently stressed that intelligence progressed at variable rates—intelligence, he believed, was malleable rather than fixed and could be altered by the environment and, therefore, could only be compared among children of the same background and education.

He understood that a low score signaled a student could benefit from increased instruction, introduction to learning strategies, and techniques and individualized attention.

Binet firmly declared that his test was never intended as "a general device for ranking all pupils according to mental worth," and believed it would be a serious mistake to use what had come to be referred to as an “IQ score” to define a child’s intelligence.

When creating a test to measure anything, one must have a working definition of the state or condition the test aims to measure—in this case, intelligence.

And here’s where things get sticky: Each test was designed to match the tester’s definition of intelligence, and this bias was baked into every test revision that superseded the last.

While Binet’s test was making him a household name in France, a man in America was floundering to understand how to study and classify his students.

But, unlike Binet, this man, H.H. “Henry” Goddard was not interested in helping students learn better; rather, he wanted to advance his social agenda, known as eugenics (which means “good in birth” and is a form of scientific racism that appropriates a variety of scientific measures and methods to further the immoral theory of white European superiority—what they considered the perfect human being—and the inferiority of non-white, and marginalized people, whom they wanted to eliminate.)

Goddard’s goal was to identify and get help for those students with non-intellectual health concerns that prevented them from regularly attending school and distinguish them from those with limited mental capacity requiring special education.

Like most contamination, eugenics grew from the corruption of scientific advances—Goddard was no exception. The director of research for the New Jersey Training School for Feeble-Minded Boys and Girls (yes, really), Goddard, coined the term “moron.”

His job was to conduct a “psychological study of the feeble-minded children,” but he didn’t know how to do it.

So he traveled to Europe to study and learn from other researchers—and by “study and learn,” I mean steal. He learned about the Binet-Simon scale while he was in France.

After two months abroad, and with Binet’s test firmly in hand, Goddard returned to America, modified Binet’s test, customizing it to fit his agenda of eliminating those who were functioning at what appeared to be low intellect.

Instead of using mental age as criteria he settled on numbers, each one with its own identifying marker: moron, imbecile, idiot, or feeble-minded.

This test, baked deeply in racial bias and bigotry, kick-started the American IQ Testing movement.

Goddard believed that a test of intelligence was an objective measure of the innate capacity of the brain.

As a eugenicist who wanted to create a society in his image, Goddard’s scoring system allowed him to keep track of anyone who fell into the lowest categories so they could be easily removed from society, institutionalized, and/or sterilized.

Goddard’s version of Binet’s test was published in 1908, three years after the original. Goddard called it: “The Binet and Simon Tests of Intellectual Capacity." And, with the facility of a marketing guru, managed to circulate over 22,000 copies between the years 1908 and 1918.

Meanwhile, American educators were grappling with the cascading age ranges in classrooms—Goddard saw this as his entree into the market.

Offering up his modified Binet scale to help address the question of age versus grade, he began showing teachers how to apply the Binet tests he subverted, urging a wider use and application to all fields and of course, implementing his scoring system of markers, from “moron” to “feeble-minded.”

Army Recruiter Administering IQ Test to Black Man

Goddard’s courses were popular, attracting lawyers who wanted to use the tests in the courtroom. He even managed to convince doctors to use the tests on patients.

By 1913, Goddard had single-handedly spread the gospel of IQ testing throughout America. Now, to prove its effectiveness in identifying and separating “feeble-minded” folks from “normal” people, he brought the test to Ellis Island and administered them to immigrants, none of whom spoke English.

As one would imagine, after an arduous and often terrifying journey, these travel-weary and hungry non-English speakers might not perform so well on an Americanized test that featured culturally biased English questions. Goddard's results suggested that 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians, 87% of the Russians, and 83% of the Jews were feeble-minded.

Immigrant Children With Toys at Christmas

Goddard insisted that IQ was a measure of innate ability and that these scores were fixed for life.

Did we want such people in our country?

Henry Goddard took a good-faith intelligence test used to help struggling students and corrupted it to advance his eugenic theories.

Lewis Terman, an educational psychologist at Stanford University and member of the Human Betterment Foundation, was a stalwart eugenicist who also had a vision of a new American elite.

This America would be cleansed of crime, poverty, and “imbeciles.” IQ tests could identify men of intelligence, and those were the men who should lead. With the Binet test in his clutches, he revised it, reshaping the questions and scoring to further his eugenic ideas.

1916, Houghton Mifflin Co

He named this new test “The Stanford-Binet.”

Obscuring the people he aimed to identify, Terman popularized his test more than Goddard had. By painting a vision of American elitism that only his test could determine, he won over the army, the government, and schools. Each was eager to assess and advance the strongest, most intelligent Americans.

Each iteration of Binet’s original IQ test begat another one and soon a single organization was created to oversee all standardized testing. The organization was created in part because of the desire to produce a governing elite.

In fact, according to Nicholas Lemann’s excellent book on the subject, The Big Test, the founder of this organization, Henry Chauncey, wanted to:

“categorize, sort, and route the entire population … by administering a series of multiple-choice mental tests to everyone, and then by suggesting, on the basis of the scores, what each person’s role in society should be.”

This idea was channeled into a test called the SAT, and the organization Chauncey founded is the Educational Testing Service.

In 1924, there was a congressional debate over immigration, which found in favor of lowering existing quotas of entry from 3% to 2%. Congress decided to lower the quota and pass the Immigration Restriction Act, based largely on the testimony of educator and superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, Harry Hamilton Loughlin, whose pet project was immigration restriction and sterilization of the “unfit.”

It was upon Loughlin’s examples of IQ testing, specifically how Nordic and Anglo-Saxon heritage were found to be more intelligent, that swayed Congress.

The Immigration Act completely excluded immigrants from Asia. The only House committee members who questioned the results and their implications were, not coincidentally, Jewish.

The cumulative effect of changing laws, creating new medicine and shaping education to fit the narratives spun by one eugenicist after another is a vital part not just of Intelligence Testing but of American History.

During the 1920s, things got more bleak and ominous when the Supreme Court, in 1927, ruled in Buck v. Bell that Virginia could carry out forced sterilization of a mental hospital inmate.

The court ruled that Virginia could sterilize “feebleminded” persons due to the public interest in stopping the country from being “swamped with incompetence.”

Notably, not only was Carrie Buck judged to be feeble-minded, but her mother and daughter were, too, lending greater support (in the public mind) to hereditarians’ argument.

In the 1930s, David Weschler, the Romanian-American chief psychologist of Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York, who was not—praise be—a eugenicist, felt limited by Goddard’s alteration of the Binet test, and given its non-suitability to test people of all ages, decided to develop his test.

The Bellevue-Wechsler Scale became the first standardized IQ test for adults.

Weschler, like Alfred Binet, believed that intelligence, beyond mental ability, included emotional states and personality traits, which were reflected in the environment in which the test was taken.

He viewed intelligence as an effect, not a cause, and sought to categorize and test within that context. What he ultimately created was a much needed return to Alfred Binet’s original work and intention. He followed up the Bellevue test with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and, later, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS).

While there are a proliferation of IQ tests in circulation today, the two most relied upon IQ tests are both Wechsler Tests (the WISC and the WAIS), as well as the most current revision of the Stanford Binet.

Despite this long history, and the advances in science and psychological thought, modern standardized testing still doesn’t account for the full spectrum of the human being tested—it can’t.

The only truly objective trait a test can measure is how well one takes a test in artificial environments under forced and arbitrary time constraints in a sweaty room proximate to one’s tormentors, victims, crushes, exes, old best friends, and frenemies.

Until the full spectrum of the human being is considered, tests of any type can only measure how skilled a person is at taking a test. Yet, we are shuttled, sorted, routed, and categorized based on a test whose premise has been flawed and whose pretext has been subverted. Every future in America is beholden to this faulty system, but that was never the test’s intention.

Stanford Binet

Our society confuses information for intelligence, but having facts and figures at the ready does not make a person intelligent; it simply means they can retain information.

Of all the things the IQ test takes into account, there are even more factors that it excludes and ignores. The capacity for empathy, and the ability to feel and identify emotions inside your body are also indicators of a profound intelligence.

The Stanford-Binet, the Weschler, the WAIS, and the SAT are IQ tests that, while revised over time, have all gone through a standardization process, relying on a representative sample of the entire population who will eventually take the test. What this means is that we are all expected, on some level, to be the same.

But that is not what being means, or how being operates.

Intelligence is difficult to define; there are many different ways to describe it, yet there is only one way to standardize it. A panel of experts has decided what it is people should know, and they call this information “intelligence.”

The IQ test and every other standardized test are reflections of this definition and, usually, they do not relate in any way to the interior life of the person being tested. We cannot all be the same.

The fact that sameness is expected feels remarkably eugenic. Perhaps that’s no coincidence since we’re using these tests the way eugenicists did and not how they were designed to be used.

Student Being Tested

If all the standardized tests were based on their original designs, perhaps we would be less ashamed to identify areas of weakness and difference.

After all, a test that’s been co-opted to identify and advance intelligence cannot very well be the same test that helps identify and address weakness.

True intelligence cannot be measured because true intelligence is information plus perception, which equals wisdom.

This cannot be calculated or contained. The sooner we understand that information and intelligence are not the same, the sooner we can make truly insightful choices.

And you? Have you ever taken an IQ test? Did you know this history?

Let me know in the comments!

Until next week I remain…

Amanda

(Nope, I'm not a therapist or medical professional. I'm just a human being who has spent most of her life trying to figure out how to live.)

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