The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

204 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN

oftener than it does in the general population.* I assume that most of you,

like myself, will find it difficult to admit that the foregoing may be the true

view. We have worked too long under the old concept (1928, pp. 223-

224).

Goddard concluded (1928, p. 225) in reversing the two bul-

warks of his former system:

1. Feeble-mindedness (the moron) \snot incurable [Goddard's italics].


2. The feeble-minded do not generally need to be segregated in insti-
   tutions.
   "As for myself," Goddard confessed (p. 224), "I think I have gone
   over to the enemy."

Lewis M. Terman and the mass marketing of innate IQ

Without offering any data on all that occurs between conception and the

age of kindergarten, they announce on the basis of what they have got

out of a few thousand questionnaires that they are measuring the hered-

itary mental endowment of human beings. Obviously, this is not a

conclusion obtained by research. It is a conclusion planted by the will to

believe. It is, I think, for the most part unconsciously planted. ... If the

impression takes root that these tests really measure intelligence, that

they constitute a sort of last judgment on the child's capacity, that they

reveal "scientifically" his predestined ability, then it would be a thousand

times better if all the intelligence testers and all their questionnaires were

sunk without warning in the Sargasso Sea.

— WALTER LIPPMANN, in the course of a debate with Lewis Terman

Mass testing and the Stanford-Binet

Lewis M. Terman, the twelfth child in an Indiana farm family
of fourteen, traced his interest in the study of intelligence to an
itinerant book peddler and phrenologist who visited his home
when he was nine or ten and predicted good things after feeling
the bumps on his skull. Terman pursued this early interest, never
doubting that a measurable mental worth lay inside people's heads.
In his doctoral dissertation of 1906, Terman examined seven
"bright" and seven "stupid" boys and defended each of his tests as
a measure of intelligence by appealing to the standard catalogue of

*Do not read into this statement more than Goddard intended. He had not aban-

doned his belief in the heritability of moronity itself. Moron parents will have

moron children, but they can be made useful through education. Moron parents,

however, do not preferentially beget defectives oflower grade—idiots and imbeciles.