THE REAL ERROR OF CYRIL BURT 325
widely in early life and first stabilized at about age eleven. Spear-
man wrote in 1927 (p. 367): "If once, then, a child of 11 years or
so has had his relative amount of g measured in a really accurate
manner, the hope of teachers and parents that he will ever rise to
a much higher standing as a late-bloomer would seem to be illu-
sory." Second, Burt's "group factors," which (for purposes of sep-
aration by general mental worth) could only be viewed as
disturbers of g, did not strongly affect a child until after age eleven.
The 1931 Hadow report proclaimed that "special abilities rarely
reveal themselves in any notable degree before the age of 11."
Burt often claimed that his primary goal in supporting 11+ was
a "liberal" one—to provide access to higher education for disad-
vantaged children whose innate talents might otherwise not be rec-
ognized. I do not doubt that a few children of high ability were
thus aided, though Burt himself did not believe that many people
of high intelligence lay hidden in the lower classes. (He also
believed that their numbers were rapidly decreasing as intelligent
people moved up the social ladder leaving the lower classes more
and more depleted of intellectual talent—1946, p. 15. R. Herrn-
stein [1971] caused quite a ruckus with the identical argument,
recycled, a few years back.)*
Yet the major effect of 11 +, in terms of human lives and hopes,
surely lay with its primary numerical result—80 percent branded
as unfit for higher education by reason of low innate intellectual
ability. Two incidents come to mind, memories of two years spent
in Britain during the regime of 11 + : children, already labeled suf-
ficiently by the location of their school, daily walking through the
streets of Leeds in their academic uniforms, readily identified by
all as the ones who hadn't qualified; a friend who had failed 11 +
but reached the university anyway because she had learned Latin
on her own, when her secondary modern school did not teach it
and universities still required it for entrance into certain courses
(how many other working-class teenagers would have had the
means or motivation, whatever their talents and desires?).
Burt was committed to his eugenic vision of saving Britain by
finding and educating its few people of eminent talent. For the
rest, I assume that he wished them well and hoped to match their
education with their ability as he perceived it. But the 80 percent
"The recycling reached full and lengthy fruition when Herrnstein and Charles
Murray used the same claim as the opening gambit and general basis for The Bell
Curve (1994).