THE MISMEASURE OF MANwho, when Dreyfus was believed to be guilty, discovered in his handwriting
signs of a traitor or a spy" (1905, p. 170).
Not only did Binet decline to label IQ as inborn intelligence; he
also refused to regard it as a general device for ranking all pupils
according to mental worth. He devised his scale only for the limited
purpose of his commission by the ministry of education: as a prac-
tical guide for identifying children whose poor performance indi-
cated a need for special education—those who we would today call
learning disabled or mildly retarded. Binet wrote (1908, p. 263):
"We are of the opinion that the most valuable use of our scale will
not be its application to the normal pupils, but rather to those of
inferior grades of intelligence." As to the causes of poor perfor-
mance, Binet refused to speculate. His tests, in any case, could not
decide (1905, p. 37):
Our purpose is 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.
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; conse-
quently, we shall neglect his etiology, and we shall make no attempt to
distinguish between acquired and congenital idiocy. ... As to that which
concerns his future, we shall exercise the same abstinence; we do not
attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis, and we leave unanswered the
question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improvable. We
shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present men-
tal state.
But of one thing Binet was sure: whatever the cause of poor
performance in school, the aim of his scale was to identify in order
to help and improve, not to label in order to limit. Some children
might be innately incapable of normal achievement, but all could
improve with special help.
The difference between strict hereditarians and their oppo-
nents is not, as some caricatures suggest, the belief that a child's
performance is all inborn or all a function of environment and
learning. I doubt that the most committed antihereditarians have
ever denied the existence of innate variation among children. The
differences are more a matter of social policy and educational prac-
tice. Hereditarians view their measures of intelligence as markers
of permanent, inborn limits. Children, so labeled, should be sorted,