Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [149]
He did recognize, however, that the children at Vineland were not all defective to the same degree, and that to determine what kind of training would be best for each one, he needed a way of measuring individual levels of mental ability. For a while he tried using Cattell’s anthropometric tests, but with no success. Then, during a trip to France, he learned about the 1908 Binet-Simon scale, recognized its merits, and immediately translated it into English, making no changes except to replace a few French cultural references with American equivalents.
Goddard was the first to use the Binet-Simon scale for mass testing; he administered it to four hundred children at the training school and two thousand children in the New Jersey public schools. His results showed a broad range of intelligence scores among the feeble-minded children and also, surprisingly, among public school pupils, an alarming number of whom tested below their age norms.37
This motivated him to begin a campaign for intelligence testing in the public schools to locate below-normal children and shunt them into special classes; he also began offering courses for teachers in the use of the Binet-Simon scale and distributed thousands of copies to colleagues across the United States. Within half a dozen years the Binet-Simon scale was being used in many public schools, where it played an important part in the decisions teachers made about the education of students. It was also in use at a number of institutions for “mental defectives,” reform schools, and juvenile and police courts, where it influenced the treatment accorded inmates and offenders.38
Goddard argued that low intelligence was a serious societal problem that had to be vigorously attacked. Idiots and imbeciles were no threat to society, he said, since they usually do not propagate their kind, but “high-grade defectives” or morons (a word Goddard invented) were very likely, he claimed, not only to become social misfits or criminals but to beget offspring who were equally likely to become antisocial. He also viewed the matter the other way around, saying that many criminals, most alcoholics and prostitutes, and “all persons who are incapable of adapting themselves to their environment and living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly” were hereditarily mentally inferior.39
These assertions were based both on his use of the Binet-Simon scale and on his study of the descendants of a soldier in the American Revolution, one Martin Kallikak (a pseudonym), who sired a son by a feeble-minded barmaid and later married a Quaker woman and had children by her. Goddard traced Kallikak’s many hundreds of descendants by both women down the generations to the early years of the twentieth century, and reported that a majority of those on the barmaid’s side were feeble-minded, immoral, or criminal, and nearly all of those on the Quaker woman’s side were upstanding members of society.
We now know that the study was grievously flawed. Among other things, few family members were or could be tested, and most were rated as to intelligence by looks alone or secondhand reports and hearsay. Also, Goddard said that the environments in which descendants of both sides were raised were basically the same, but existing information (such as infant mortality in the two lines) clearly showed the opposite. But at the time (1912) and for many years, The Kallikak Family was taken by many psychologists and the reading public to be dramatic proof of the genetic transmission of intellectual ability—Goddard actually spoke of “good blood” and “bad blood”40—and of its social consequences.
Goddard’s Binet-Simon data and his findings about the Kallikak family led him to take a position far more severe than Galton’s: “It is perfectly clear that no feeble-minded person should ever be allowed to marry or become a parent.