Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [148]
Although Binet and Simon, in their choice of test material, sought to measure “natural intelligence”—innate ability—rather than rote learning,31 Binet was not a rigid hereditarian like Galton. He explicitly stated that the scale said nothing about the child’s past or future but was an appraisal only of his present state.32 Binet warned that the test results, if interpreted rigidly, might label and condemn to an inferior life some children who, with special help and training, could raise their intelligence level, and in a late work he cited with pride the increases in intelligence that had been obtained in special classes for subnormal children in an experimental school that he had founded.33
The 1908 scale was a remarkable success. By 1914 over 250 articles and books had been published commenting on or making use of it, and by 1916 the 1908 or 1911 revisions were being used throughout much of the United States, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, and China, and had been translated into Japanese and Turkish. The need for such a measuring device clearly had become great in industrial societies. The psychologist Henry H. Goddard, who introduced the scale to American psychologists in 1910, wrote in 1916 that it was hardly an exaggeration to say that “the world is talking of the Binet-Simon Scale.”34 And that was only the beginning.
Binet, who died in 1911 at the age of fifty-four, did not live to see his triumph, but if he had, he might have been saddened to note that his scale, widely adopted in other countries, was neither appreciated nor used in France. It came into use there only in the 1920s, when a French social worker brought it back from America. Binet himself was little esteemed in his own country until 1971, when at last a ceremony honoring him and Simon was held at the school where he had instituted experimental methods of teaching the retarded.
The Testing Mania
Nowhere was intelligence testing as swiftly and enthusiastically adopted as in the United States. And for good reason. In a country with a fluid social structure, a rapidly expanding need for workers who could master complex technological jobs, a growing underclass of the poor, delinquent, and criminal, and an influx of millions of ill-educated and seemingly semiprimitive immigrants, a scientific way of evaluating the mental capacity of individuals offered the leaders of society a way to make social order out of chaos.35
But while Binet had believed that the intelligence of mental defectives, especially those close to normal, could be increased by special training, most of the early advocates of intelligence testing in the United States took Galton’s position that heredity was the largest determinant of mental development and that the individual’s intelligence was therefore unchangeable. They saw mental measurement as a means by which society could channel its members into the kinds of schools and jobs their innate capacity fitted them for and as a diagnostic device with which to identify those individuals who should be restrained from reproducing and passing on their defectiveness.
Henry Goddard was one of the leading exponents of this view. Goddard (1865–1957), a forceful and dynamic man, had been trained at Clark University, where G. Stanley Hall (one of Wundt’s early students), a convinced hereditarian, was the head of the psychology department. Goddard absorbed the hereditarian view, and when, in 1906, he became the director of the research laboratory of the Vineland, New Jersey, Training School for the Feeble-minded, it seemed