THE REAL ERROR OF CYRIL BURT
principles: first (the theme of this chapter) that general intelligence
is a single, measurable entity (Spearman's g); second (Burt's own
idee fixe) that a person's general intelligence is almost entirely
innate and unchangeable. Thus, Burt sought the relationship
among persons in a unilinear ranking of inherited mental worth. He
used factor analysis to validate this single scale and to plant people
upon it. "The very object of the factor-analysis," he wrote (1940, p.
136), "is to deduce from an empirical set of test measurements a
single figure for each single individual." Burt sought (1940, p. 176)
"one ideal order, acting as a general factor, common to every
examiner and to every examinee, predominating over, though no
doubt disturbed by, other irrelevant influences."
Burt's vision of a single ranking based on inherited ability
fueled the major political triumph in Britain of hereditarian theo-
ries of mental testing. If the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924
signalled the chief victory of American hereditarians in psychol-
ogy, then the so-called examination at 11 + awarded their British
counterparts a triumph of equal impact. Under this system for
streaming children into different secondary schools, pupils took an
extensive examination at age ten or eleven. As a result of these
tests, largely an attempt to assess Spearman's g for each child, 20
percent were sent to "grammar" schools where they might prepare
for entry to a university, while 80 percent were relegated to tech-
nical or "secondary modern" schools and regarded as unfit for
higher education.
Cyril Burt defended this separation as a wise step for "warding
off the ultimate decline and fall that has overtaken each of the
great civilizations of the past" (1959, p. 117):It is essential in the interests alike of the children themselves and of the
nation as a whole, that those who possess the highest ability—the cleverest
of the clever—should be identified as accurately as possible. Of the meth-
ods hitherto tried out the so-called 11 + exam has proved to be by far the
most trustworthy (1959, p. 117).Burt's only complaint (1959, p. 32) was that the test and subsequent
selection came too late in a child's life.
The system of examination at 11 + and subsequent separation
of schools arose in conjunction with a series of official reports
issued by government committees during twenty years (the Hadow