76 PRETEND INTELLIGENCEALFRED BINET’S TESTIt needs to be stressed that the motives behind the mea sure ment of intel-
ligence have been predominantly practical, social motives, not theoreti-
cal ones. Th ere were many social pressures fueling such motives in the
early years of the twentieth century. Among them was the introduction,
in many countries of Eu rope, of systems of compulsory education. Th ese
mea sures brought into schools enormous numbers of children who, for
what ever reasons, did not learn the curriculum as quickly as others. Th ere
was natu ral concern about these diff erences. In 1904, the French minis-
ter for public instruction appointed a commission to study how such “re-
tarded” children (as they were then called) could be identifi ed early, so
remedial action could be taken. It recommended that no child should be
removed to a special school without a “medico- pedagogical” examination
to determine his or her ability to profi t from teaching in an ordinary
school. But how was this to be done?
A member of this commission was the psychologist Alfred Binet. With
his assistants, he had been studying mental development, and ways of
assessing it, for over a de cade. So he was charged by the commission to
off er advice on such examinations. Binet’s vision was not for a test of a
single ability, but of a multifaceted function requiring multiple short tests
or “items.” In his 1962 book on the history of psy chol ogy, George Miller
goes on to describe how Binet and assistant Th eodore Simon “spent endless
hours in the schools with the children, watching, asking, testing, record-
ing. Each proposed test had to be given to a large number of children. If a
test did not distinguish the brighter from the duller, or the older from the
younger, it was abandoned.... Th e memory tests worked. And the tests
of comprehension worked.... Binet did not retain the tests on the basis of
a theory; he let their behaviour decide which tests were good and which
were irrelevant.”^4
Unlike Galton, Binet’s test criterion was not social rank but school
per for mance, as judged by teachers, together with age. Again, however,
there was no theory to guide test se lection, only the yardstick of a collat-
eral mea sure. Items were selected according to whether individuals’
per for mance on them increased with age and corresponded with their
per for mance in school as assessed by teachers.
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