2 IO THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
they have classified and forget that their duty is to educate. They will grade
the retarded child instead of fighting the causes of his backwardness. For
the whole drift of the propaganda based on intelligence testing is to treat
people with low intelligence quotients as congenitally and hopelessly
inferior.
Terman's technocracy of innateness
If it were true, the emotional and worldly satisfactions in store for the
intelligence tester would be very great. If he were really measuring intel-
ligence, and if intelligence were a fixed hereditary quantity, it would be
for him to say not only where to place each child in school, but also
which children should go to high school, which to college, which into the
professions, which into the manual trades and common labor. If the
tester would make good his claim, he would soon occupy a position of
power which no intellectual has held since the collapse of theocracy. The
vista is enchanting, and even a little of the vista is intoxicating enough. If
only it could be proved, or at least believed, that intelligence is fixed by
heredity, and that the tester can measure it, what a future to dream
about! The unconscious temptation is too strong for the ordinary critical
defenses of the scientific methods. With the help of a subtle statistical
illusion, intricate logical fallacies and a few smuggled obiter dicta, self-
deception as the preliminary to public deception is almost
automatic. — WALTER LIPPMANN, in a debate with Terman
Plato had dreamed of a rational world ruled by philosopher-
kings. Terman revived this dangerous vision but led his corps of
mental testers in an act of usurpation. If all people could be tested,
and then sorted into roles appropriate for their intelligence, then
a just, and, above all, efficient society might be constructed for the
first time in history.
Dealing off the bottom, Terman argued that we must first
restrain or eliminate those whose intelligence is too low for an
effective or moral life. The primary cause of social pathology is
innate feeble-mindedness. Terman (1916, p. 7) criticized Lom-
broso for thinking that the externalities of anatomy might record
criminal behavior. Innateness, to be sure, is the source, but its
direct sign is low IQ, not long arms or a jutting jaw:The theories of Lombroso have been wholly discredited by the results of
intelligence tests. Such tests have demonstrated, beyond any possibility of
doubt, that the most important trait of at least 25 percent of our criminals
is mental weakness. The physical abnormalities which have been found so
common among prisoners are not the stigmata of criminality, but the
physical accompaniments of feeble-mindedness. They have no diagnostic
significance except in so far as they are indications of mental deficiency
(1916, p. 7).