Intelligence Testing at Whittier State School, 1891 to 1920

This study examines foster child case records to understand how intelligence testing was used by guidance counselors and social workers to negotiate welfare resources with poor youths in the early 20th-century. Psychological testing justified racial hierarchy in a scientific language suited for a rational professional bureaucracy. Yet, it was also a technique for individual analysis that allowed poor children and youths to observe themselves and to speak about themselves in ways that countered biological determinism. The clinical reports and case notes suggest that foster youths often figured themselves as social actors resisting the unfavorable assessments presented by the professionals. The practice of making bio-social predictions about fostered youths, ironically, cleared space for an opposing figure to take shape in the words of the youths themselves: the agentive, political youth demanding recognition and resources. This article opens a rare window upon the 'governmentality' of childhood by allowing us to consider the ways that structures of assessment allowed the subject to view the self as an object.

2001

Feeble-mindedness produces more pauperism, degeneracy and crime than any other one force.. .. Its cost is beyond our comprehension. It is the unappreciated burden of the unfortunate. It is a burden we are compelled to bear; therefore let us bear it intelligently, to the end that the chain of evil may be lessened, the weak cared for, and the future brighter with hope because of our efforts. Amos W. Butler, Secretary, Indiana Board of State Charities, 1907' Up to the present time we have been merely dallying with the problem of the defective. When are we as a nation going to wake up and face this mighty task with the consideration and care it deserves? When are we going to lay out a concerted and comprehensive plan for dealing with the problem of the feeble-minded? I cannot answer the question, but for the sake of the coming generations, I hope it will be soon. George S. Bliss, Superintendent, Indiana School for Feebleminded Youth, 19162 In 1924 Congress passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act, severely restricting immigration to the United States. A primary factor in its passage was the powerful, generalized belief that many immigrants were mentally inferior and thus posed a threat to the biological, social, intellectual, and moral integrity of the nation. H. H. Goddard's administration of intelligence tests to newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island during the 1910s and his shocking conclusions regarding the large number of immigrants who were mentally "defective"-"morons," or worse-startled the American political leadership. Moreover, his "scientific" conclusions reinforced the widespread belief that intellectual inferiority was a fixed, inherited trait that was largely responsible for the crime, vice, and poverty that plagued the United States during the early twentieth century. Passed at the end of the Progressive era, this legislation was a deliberate attempt to engineer a healthier, safer, more moral, and more intelligent ~ociety.~

This study won a national article prize from the History of Science Society. Informed by group-grid theory, it offers a political analysis of the rise and fall of Henry H. Goddard's eugenic program at Ohio's Bureau of Juvenile Research from 1913-1922.

This dissertation analyzes debates about intelligence and educational opportunity in the post-World War II US, from 1945- 1965. I examine how “intelligence”--as an idea about human difference--was constructed in this period in response to a shifting complex of social and scientific pressures and moreover, how it functioned through policy to regulate educational opportunity. This was a period dense with events that rapidly transformed the educational landscape, including the fitful early years of desegregation following Brown v. Board, the Sputnik Crisis and the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Such rapid transformations readily evoked the ordering principle of “intelligence.” While exploring larger Cold War/Civil Rights contexts, my research focuses on specific networks of collaboration between ETS, the National Education Association (NEA), Eisenhower administration architects of the NDEA, and James Bryant Conant, via his widely disseminated study of US public high schools, The American High School Today. These actors formed a largely sub rosa collaboration that worked to the political and financial advantage of the NEA and ETS. As well, they positioned The American High School Today as a seemingly independent, scientifically objective endorsement of the NDEA. To wit, The American High School Today and the NDEA both pressed—yet without observable affiliation—the need to identify “highly able” high school students through augmented guidance and testing programs, and to afford these students selective curricula in the sciences, math and foreign languages. While the NDEA contained broad and neutrally stated initiatives addressed to these aims, The American High School Today followed six months later mapping well-defined, naturalized thresholds of individual intelligence to proposed sequences of ability-tracked science, math and foreign language curriculum. This collaboration propelled the subsequent explosion of a new strain of discourse across a range of national media and popular literatures that worked to construct the category of the “academically talented” and “gifted” child, and advocate for this student’s access to select curricula in the public schools. Furthermore, while calls to identify and selectively educate high “intelligence” drew explicit justification from the Sputnik Crisis and the science race with the Soviets, I find that white anxieties about “race”--and, specifically, desegregation following Brown v. Board--were a powerful tacit driver.

Multiethnica, 2018

While primarily concerned with developments in the 1950s, this analysis begins by reexamining the historiography of IQ and intelligence testing in the first half of the 20th century, indicating as it does so an emergent emphasis on the individualization of “intelligence” in the Stanford/Iowa IQ debates of the 1930s. Given the character and tendency of the trend that emerges, I propose a model for understanding these developments: one which situates conceptions of racial and individual ”intelligence” as entangled and co-evolving ideologies. With this historiographical model in place I turn to evidence from National Defense Education Act (NDEA) hearings and related NDEA-era texts. These documents demonstrate that NDEA reforms attempted to rehabilitate testing as fair and “race”-neutral, and were further structured around the logics of individual “ability.” While NDEA reforms asserted that such individualization of educational opportunity was a scientifically objective, “race”-neutral process, discourse analysis reveals that it was instead profoundly entangled with the logics of “race” and a history — indeed a present — from which it imagined it had cut itself loose.

A revisionist examination of the "new eugenics," which had been described by historians as more scientific and liberal. This paper examines the efforts of Pioneer Fund scholars to re-assert the claim that there are racial differences in intelligence and that there was a dysgenic trend which needed to countered with social policies that included sterilization of the unfit.

1980

Chicanos have been limited in their educational opportunities, as evidenced by their urderrepresentation in occupations and professions requiring extended education. It is proposed that intelligence testing is one part of an educational ideology that ascribes the Chicano's unequal educational existence to the group's inability to function competently within the Anglo-American institutional environment. This paper discusses intelligence testing es an educational activity, its implicit assumptions, and the educational and social policy implications of intelligence testing for Chicanos. The hereditarian and environmentalist positions are described. The hereditarian position places greater responsibility on 'he person for his level of inequality, whereas, the environmentalist position employs the aggregation of personal inequality by social group to support structured levels of social inequality. The simple observation that intelligence test scores and performance in school and at work are closely associated has too often prompted intelligence test experts to conclude that the benefits of education and occupation are distributed on the basis of intelligence. On the contrary, it has been demonstrated that one's socioeconomic origin has a closer association with economic and occupational success than level of intelligence. (Author/RL)

2018

While Primarily Concerned with Developments in the 1950s, this analysis begins by reexamining the historiography of IQ and intelligence testing in the first half of the 20th century, indicating tha ...