78 PRETEND INTELLIGENCERETARDATION IN WHAT?From a purely practical viewpoint, Binet’s scale appeared to be a brilliant
success. It was easily and quickly administered, and it actually identifi ed
the children it was supposed to identify. It is doubtful whether it did this
any better than, say, teachers could have done on the basis of their expe-
rience with the children ( aft er all, this was the only criterion, next to age
discrimination, of the acceptability of test items). But it seemed more sys-
tematic and aff orded immediate comparability across children of the same
or diff er ent ages, so that degree of retardation seemed to be indicated.
But what it mea sured retardation in is quite a diff er ent point. Note that
the test result provides no new psychological information; nothing that
was not already known about a child. How could it? As George Miller
put it, Binet “was not over- concerned with scientifi c purity; he had a prac-
tical prob lem he urgently wanted to solve, and he did what ever seemed
necessary to solve it.”^5 And Binet himself insisted that the test merely “clas-
sifi ed” children rather than mea sured some fundamental potential.
THE SUBVERSION OF BINET’S TESTBinet certainly scoff ed at any claims to be mea sur ing innate intelligence.
But others were soon to claim other wise. Scores correlated with school
per for mance, as the tests were selected to do. In addition, though— and
unlike Galton’s eff orts— they were also associated with social class and
“racial ” background. Th is is hardly surprising. In so describing children’s
preparedness for school we are refl ecting their social and family back-
ground, and, in a sense, the whole social structure of society. But the
Anglo- American followers of Galton had other ideas about what the score
diff erences signifi ed: the intelligence and the supposed “superior strains
and races” that Galton had hoped to scientifi cally identify.
Th e most rapid developments took place in the United States, where
so- called feeble- mindedness, especially among the new wave of immi-
grants in the early 1900s, was seen to be a pressing prob lem. It had seri-
ous implications for education and national social security. Part of the
solution was conceived by Henry H. Goddard when he translated Binet’sThis content downloaded from 139.184.14.159 on Tue, 17 Oct 2017 13:52:12 UTChttp://www.ebook3000.com