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9486 in the collection
IQ: The Brilliant Idea That Failed
As the reviewer observes, the title of this book is curious. As the author shows, IQ tests have not failed but are rampant world wide.
Book Review
IQ: The Brilliant Idea That Failed by Stephen Murdoch
Duckworth, pp 284
by John Carey
The reason why the subject of intelligence tests arouses such fury (try discussing the 11-plus at a dinner party) is that the pros and cons are evenly balanced. One side argues that human beings are infinitely various, so any standard test is bound to be unjust. The other side replies that a test that selects on grounds of ability, however imperfect, is fairer than the alternatives universally favoured before intelligence tests were thought of, namely, selection on grounds of family, money, social class, race or colour. Both sides are right, which means that each is driven to devise passionate and contorted arguments to prove the other wrong.
Stephen Murdoch’s well-informed and violently prejudiced book illustrates this. He hates intelligence tests and abominates psychologists for inventing them. In his opinion, they are a ruthless set of parvenus, avid for funding and respect, neither of which they deserve, and unable even to define the “intelligence” they are supposed to be testing. The worldwide ascendancy they now enjoy came about, he contends, through historical accident. The advent of universal education in several countries at the end of the 19th century meant that retarded children had to be identified, so as to receive special provision, and a French psychologist, Alfred Binet, came up with a test for this, from which all modern IQ tests derive. The idea caught on in America, which was facing a population boom. Immigration officers on Ellis Island were empowered to turn back the feeble-minded, as well as beggars, anarchists, epileptics and other undesirables, and in 1910 tests were introduced to sort out the confusion in America’s overcrowded public schools.
In the first world war, a group of psychologists administered Binet-type tests to 1.7m recruits to the American army and, taking this as a cross-section, they concluded that about half the American population were morons (a technical term, indicating a mental age of 8-12, whereas imbeciles have a mental age of 3-7, and idiots of 2 or less). Opinions will differ as to the probable reliability of these results, but Americans seem to have taken them in their stride. A mental age of 8 was considered adequate for military service, so recruitment was not hindered, and word quickly spread through the American advertising industry that they should aim at an audience with the mentality of 12-year-olds. Meanwhile, schools and colleges eagerly adopted intelligence testing, including timesaving novelties such as multiple-choice questions. Attacked by diehards as “assembly-line” education, these efficiencies helped America send more of its young people to college than any other nation.
Murdoch insists that IQ tests have an “appalling” history, and he is partly right. Even before Binet, Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, had suggested that tests could be used to identify imbeciles, who might then be sterilised to prevent them breeding more imbeciles. Although well meant, these plans were based on an inadequate understanding of genetics, and had no regard for the rights of imbeciles. The same objections apply to the utopian proposals of HG Wells, who advocated restricting parenthood to people who had passed tests of physical as well as mental fitness. But the eugenics movement cannot, despite Murdoch’s efforts, be represented as a sinister precursor of the 11-plus. Its aim was to preserve the existing class system. “The brains of our nation,” Galton proclaimed, “lie in the higher of our classes” – precisely the assumption the 11-plus was designed to challenge.
While it remained just an idea in Britain, eugenics proved popular in America. Virginia passed a law authorising sterilisation of the feeble-minded in 1927, and in the next five years 26 other states followed suit. At least 60,000 Americans were sterilised as a result. However, as Murdoch’s research indicates, it would be oversimple to blame intelligence tests for these developments. The victims were usually poor whites, resented by their communities, and their alleged low intelligence was no more than a pretext for neutering them and shutting them away. In the hands of the Nazis, too, the tests were a smokescreen for barbarity. Hitler studied the American legislation with interest and modelled his Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases on it. Those targeted were often prostitutes, political activists and other “asocial” elements. By the end of the second world war, 400,000 people had been sterilised throughout the Third Reich, while in Nazi institutions for the handicapped a further 200,000 were put to death, some diagnosed as feeble-minded as a result of tests concocted for the occasion, but often for bedwetting, being a “burdensome life” or “useless eater”. What this proves is that IQ tests can be fashioned into an instrument for evil, but to blame them for Nazi atrocities would be like blaming ZyklonB for Auschwitz.
Murdoch is an American, and his understanding of British education is patchy. The 11-plus, he claims, was the result of the nation’s determination “to ignore a vast majority of its people in the belief that only a slim minority, the very brightest, must be cultivated and cared for”. That scarcely reads like an objective assessment, and his assertion that the grammar schools “had institutional links to the colleges and universities of the nation” is untrue. He is aware that Britain has things called public schools, but that grammar schools were an attempt to counter the social injustices enshrined in these does not engage his attention. On American education, though, he is consistently interesting. Black students in America, he observes, have always scored, on average, 15 points lower than whites in intelligence tests, a result that racists happily advertise. However, recent research suggests that this is because tests are set in standard English, whereas young blacks speak and hear black English. When nonlinguistic tests are used, black and white students from similar backgrounds score close together.
What this shows is that IQ tests must be intelligently adapted. This was recognised way back in the history of American intelligence testing, with the development of picture-based tests for illiterates and non-English speakers.
A puzzle of Murdoch’s book is its title. What can have led him to suppose that the idea of IQ tests has failed when he clearly shows it to be rampant worldwide, and the basis, as he sourly reports, of a lucrative industry? Tests have triumphed at every level. Businesses use them to decide who to hire and promote; social-security mental-health benefits are fixed by reference to applicants’ test scores. American colleges require all candidates to take a SAT, a standard test first adopted at Harvard in the 1930s to ensure equal access to higher education.
Of course intelligence tests are not infallible. They would be intolerable if they were, for then those who failed them would have no recourse but to accept their own inferiority. But for all their imperfections they reflect a belief in inner worth, which is possibly a hangover from religious faith, and a hope that natural gifts can be rescued despite disadvantages of birth. These ideas may be naive, but they do not seem to deserve the relentless animosity that Murdoch’s undoubtedly powerful book directs at them.
— John Carey
The Sunday Times
2007-07-08
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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