A Measure of Intelligence, page 15
Once intelligence becomes measurable, it also becomes a game to win. Even in its early days, parents and psychologists alike understood what could be gained with a high IQ score. It is no coincidence that Color Cubes became one of Milton Bradley’s most popular games of the twentieth century. The sets of blocks are now produced by companies that specialize in “brain building” toys, such as Learning Resources and ThinkFun. After all, parents are just as anxious about their children’s intellect today as they were in 1923. According to these companies’ marketing descriptions, toys help young children visualize, think critically, and problem-solve.
A kind of self-satisfying circuit emerges, one that reinforces capitalism’s power to define and market good parenting. Toys resemble activities on IQ tests; some are even marketed as “Mensa approved,” appealing to those who find value in the exclusivity of the high-IQ society. Parents find out what games most closely resemble the problems on an IQ test (possibly with the help of eBay) and want to buy them for their kids, sparking a cottage industry of test-preparation through toys. As Koh realized more than a hundred years ago, children with access to these games do better on IQ tests. His observation hints that perhaps there is no way to access intelligence without cultural influence, if it exists in some pure state at all. What they do measure is whether a person has been exposed to the games, puzzles, and cultural references that are baked into the tests.
In order for IQ tests to have any clinical validity, psychologists need to guard testing material against coaching. But the barrier to access also fosters an authority based in secrecy. It discourages non-specialists from asking questions and minimizes the perspective of other forms of expertise in conversations about cognitive ability. Should a test have so much power that parents are willing to intervene in their children’s performance or spend too much money on too many toys to prepare? Is the value of IQ tests compromised if they promote such a culture? Such questions highlight that IQ testing isn’t just a tool of psychology. It is a big business. Companies and the psychologists who develop testing material want to control the circulation of their tests to protect their efficacy, but they also want to get paid for them.
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Since the development of mental tests in the late nineteenth century, the public has been willing to pay to take them and to know the results. Nine years after he published his essay declaring that “nature is far stronger than nurture,” Francis Galton set up his Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in London. Some 9,337 visitors stopped by Galton’s lab and paid three pence to undergo a variety of physical measurements and tests. Galton noted that the door to his laboratory was “thronged by applicants waiting patiently for their turn.” Adults and children alike could receive a copy of their test and choose to register their results with Galton’s office in South Kensington for future reference and follow-up testing. Capitalizing on the excitement about the new science of statistics, Galton hustled people into paying him for the data he needed to measure the differences between them. A familial cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton used the data to produce one of the first bell curves of human intelligence and propose ways in which intelligence could be improved through eugenic pursuits.
World’s Fairs were a mix of trade exhibitions and popular entertainment that celebrated technological and scientific progress. Displaying mental testing alongside other wonders of modern advancement, such as steam turbines and car batteries, legitimized psychology for the public. Anthropologist Franz Boas organized a program of anthropometric measurements to be carried out on visitors to the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. The guide to the exhibition pitched the tests to the public as if psychologists were providing a service to them for a small fee. Not only were these tests offering valuable information, but each score would stand among the pantheon of test-takers on laboratory walls.
Data collection at World’s Fairs also served as another way to advance racially motivated research. Boas and his team attempted to test as many foreign visitors as possible. He also tested members of the Native American tribes who were put on display for paying visitors to watch like zoo animals. Like Goddard at Ellis Island two decades later, Boas collected data from people whose first language was not English. Both Boas and Goddard administered mental tests to confirm preconceived beliefs about racial inferiority.
Psychologists were eager for the white public to be comfortable with mental testing, but they also wanted to protect their territory and assert their authority and expertise. It wasn’t long before the IQ test administrator was codified as a trained expert. In his 1916 study, The Measurement of Intelligence, psychologist Lewis Terman declared, “It cannot be too strongly emphasized that no one, whatever his previous training may have been, can make proper use of the scale unless he is willing to learn the method of procedure and scoring down to the minutest detail.” Psychologist Harlan Hines took an even more protective tone seven years later when he warned, “Put into the hands of untrained examiners, intelligence tests are dangerous tools.” Hines’s warning is remarkable considering how dangerous the tool had become by 1923 for immigrants, people of color, and those with intellectual differences in the hands of purportedly trained examiners.
A World’s Fair seems like a strange circumstance in which to be measured. The social interaction of public exhibitions was quite different from the private, clinical office in which I took the IQ test with Harris. But like parades and Ferris wheels, mental testing served as a form of entertainment, which suggests that it provided the public with more than just data from the beginning. In its non-clinical formats, mental testing still stages an opportunity to stroke egos and affirm superiority, no matter what a person’s social status might be. Today, other forms of entertainment provide opportunities to win the intelligence game—online IQ tests, which are completely unscientific but instantly satisfying, trivia nights at local bars, or even television game shows like Jeopardy.
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To Goddard, one of the most appealing benefits of Binet’s IQ test was its ability to predict the future. It could tell parents, educators, and lawmakers if it was worth spending the time and resources to educate a child, if a child should be placed in an institution, or if the child was a particularly promising investment. In Goddard’s words, the IQ score explained “what the child is capable of in the way of training and development—the one thing that we in institutions wish to know, and the one thing that the public is clamoring to know, the one thing that parents ask when they come to us.” IQ tests promised to quell or confirm anxieties felt by parents, while at the same time creating the fear that stokes such anxieties in the first place. They seemed to get to the core of what keeps parents up at night. Will my children be okay when they grow up? How best can I prepare my child for the future? It is easier to answer these questions if a child’s potential seems straightforward and legible. And if you know a child’s future, then it seems like destiny, and out of your hands.
By the 1920s, Goddard was receiving a steady diet of letters from parents seeking advice about their children’s education and upbringing. In one letter, Mrs. Ruth Cole begged Goddard for a fifteen-minute appointment to follow up on his previous advice about her son Maynard’s education, which was to keep him out of school if at all possible. The problem of Maynard’s education, she explained, rested entirely upon her. Surely Goddard could understand that she didn’t want to make a mistake.
On March 16, 1927, Mrs. Thomson wrote to Goddard soon after she finished reading The Kallikak Family. She and her husband planned to start a family and she wanted to know whether their child could potentially be “feeble-minded or a moron.” Mrs. Thomson explained that both she and her husband were “normal and intelligent.” In fact, she thought it was fair to say she was above average. She had graduated from high school with honors and had the highest marks on stenographic work of all the pupils in the whole school. She was not saying this to be vain, she explained. Rather, she believed this information could help Goddard advise her case.
Her husband’s side of the family, however, included some relatives of concern. His sister looked intelligent and was fairly good looking, but “there is certainly something abnormal about her.” Another brother never learned to read or write. According to The Kallikak Family, such evidence among relatives was indeed cause for worry. Goddard replied and ran through several possible genetic scenarios, but concluded that Mrs. Thomson had very little to fret about. In the cases of the brother and sister, it was most likely that “the procreative power had simply grown weak.”
Goddard’s research on intelligence appealed to a broader audience than just other psychologists. Parents believed that psychologists like Goddard could provide important information about what they could and should do to raise their children. When I read these letters, what bothered me the most was the trust that they put in Goddard and his pernicious ideas. That mothers were making parental decisions based on eugenics was horrifying enough, but these women also seemed completely lost without Goddard’s authority. They were not just seeking advice. They were fully willing to submit to the power of IQ tests. I’m not sure we do much better today. Still, parents look to test scores to quell their anxieties about the unknown future of their children. This is why glancing at Louisa’s test results makes my heart sink and my ears burn red. It appears to give me information about her future. And thanks to technological advances in genetics, we seem to be moving to a world in which future parents can be assured of the genetic “perfection” of their children even before they are born.
IQ testing managed to create the very anxieties that Goddard and others claimed that it quelled. Of course, parents had always been concerned about their kids’ well-being. But now, with the measurement of intelligence, parents could measure sibling against sibling, cousin against cousin, neighbor against neighbor and make important life decisions accordingly. IQ tests provide parents with a satisfying sense of stability about the identity and potential future of their child, while locking them into an endless cycle of need and validation.
“Is my child a genius, a moron, or somewhere in between? Most parents would very much like to know.” I am watching an episode of The Gesell Report from 1960, a weekly television program that provided parenting advice to the public. A man in a suit seated at a desk with a book open in front of him begins the episode with this question. The frankness of his words—genius, moron—hit my ears like a slap. But the host presses on, reading questions submitted by parents to Louise Bates Ames, Director of the Gesell Institute of Human Development, who answers them.
Dr. Ames was a research assistant to psychologist Arnold Gesell at the Clinic of Child Development in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1950, she became one of the founding directors of the Gesell Institute of Child Development. She wrote a number of syndicated newspaper columns for mothers and popularized the study of childhood development in the 1960s. In the two decades that followed, she wrote a series of books on child development, with volumes devoted to the ages and stages in a child’s life. Other books in the series address common parental concerns about school. School Readiness, Stop School Failure, and Is Your Child in the Wrong Grade? testify to the growing concerns about school success among parents. The series established the public role of the child psychologist in telling mothers what is normal and what is not. After all, parenting is mostly an intuitive practice, and it is deeply affirming to have an expert on your side.
I did not read Dr. Ames’s book series when Louisa was a baby, but I read many others that seemed to have the same approach. In most cases, parents just need to be reassured that everything is fine. Worry is something parents do to fill the void of the unknown, and Ames and other experts willingly took on the role of putting parents, crazed with self-doubt and sleep deprivation, in their place. And while I include all parents, I actually mean mothers. Ames’s guides are traditional in the way she assumes that her readers are mostly mothers but rarely fathers. And although our co-parenting looks nothing like Dr. Ames’s model or the ones our parents provided, I don’t recall Andy ever opening up any parenting guide to quell his anxieties as I often did.
“I think that my thirty-four-month-old son is a genius.” The host begins reading the first letter to Dr. Ames. “But nobody wants to do anything about it. How can I find out what his IQ really is? All I get is evasive answers, and they don’t believe me that he can read without trouble.” As the moderator recites the mother’s question, Dr. Ames lowers her chin and smiles politely. She wears a dark, short-sleeved sweater and a bold, geometric necklace. Her wavy hair is pinned back, and her face is thoughtful and plain behind an assertive pair of cat’s eyeglasses. Dr. Ames says casually that the mother can go to any child psychologist to have her son’s IQ tested. “However, my advice to this mother is not to find out her son’s IQ,” she continues. She speaks in a confident voice that is enriched with a New England accent. “If the child was defective it would be important to find out. But if all you’re worried about is whether your child is a genius, why not just enjoy it and not worry very much.” Dr. Ames chides the mother a bit more. “It is kind of tiresome to professional people when a mother says, ‘Now my IQ is this, my husband’s IQ is this, my three children’s IQs are this, and I want to know the IQ of this other one,’ because it’s just not that important to know. It’s especially not important to know if she’s going to go around boasting about it, which this mother is. She is making too much of it. The IQ is one measure of human behavior, but it is one small measure.”
Watching Dr. Ames dole out her confident advice, I was struck by how little has changed. She is right that the IQ test is only one measure of human behavior, one that has become grossly overvalued. But she parsed the difference between the meaning of the IQ test for psychologists, “professional people,” and the meaning of the IQ test for the mother, as if they have nothing to do with each other. I noticed similarities between the way Dr. Ames downplayed the importance of IQ testing and the way that the school psychologist told me that Louisa’s IQ doesn’t really matter. My reasons for asking questions about the IQ test may be different from this mother’s motivations, and I assume that Dr. Ames would have thought it was important for me to know Louisa’s IQ. But I recognize a shared tension underneath the annoying vanity of the mother’s question, as Dr. Ames perceived it. This mother and I both seemed to be confronting the same conflicting messages. IQ is important, but also not. It is a way to learn more about your child, but also something that is specialized information that is too complicated and beyond our reach to grasp.
Despite our differences, I recognize a bit of my own reaction to Louisa’s IQ in this mother’s question. I admit that I was rather proud that Louisa’s IQ seemed high for a child with Down syndrome, without really understanding why it mattered. But I also understand Dr. Ames’s impatience with mothers who fret over a few IQ points. I find it hard to hear these quibbles and find empathy. I presume that this mother’s child will not face the kind of intellectual discrimination that those who lived at Goddard’s Training School experienced. Her son will not be labeled “feeble-minded” or “defective.” Desperate to solidify her and her son’s exceptional nature, this mother doesn’t seem to realize how grave her concerns could be.
Perhaps the mother who wrote to Dr. Ames sensed that economic and educational opportunities were growing increasingly dependent on IQ tests. Many parents wanted to know how they could help their children do better on them. In 1958, David Engler, a teacher from New York, had his finger on the pulse of parents and wrote How to Raise Your Child’s IQ. “We live in what has been called the era of ‘mass man,’” he begins the introduction, “a time when people are thought of as statistical averages and not as individuals.” In an interview in the New York Times, Engler admits that his title is a facetious hook. He agrees with many psychologists that “it may not be possible to increase a child’s basic potential in the intellectual sphere.” But the test, he believed, “cannot plumb the depths of basic potential; it can only measure its surface indications.” Schools were becoming increasingly crowded, and the IQ test provided a convenient shorthand, Engler admitted, to determine where a child should be placed. “Just a few points may determine whether a child is selected for an enrichment class or, at the other extreme, placed with ‘slow learners.’” It is therefore encouraged, if not required, that parents do whatever they can to improve their child’s test score. The system is set, it seems. The only thing that can be changed is the pecking order, what advantage your child might have over others.
Engler imagined a number of different scenarios in his book, in which the life paths of various children would have been completely different if they had only scored a few more points on an IQ test. Bobby, for example, is “as bright as a button,” but only has an IQ of 89. He is placed in a class with a “watered-down curriculum.” At the end of the two years, Bobby’s IQ will be even lower. Eventually, he will be rejected for training as a radar technician in the armed forces. There’s also poor Marsha, who has an IQ of 128 but will not be hired for the research position she applied for because her IQ is two points below the minimum for the job. To avoid similar situations, Engler offers his parent-readers a series of exercises in the last third of his book, which are similar to but not exactly like what appeared on the most widely used intelligence tests in the 1950s. Engler claimed that the exercises were designed to increase both speed and accuracy. He stressed that children should not be made to feel that their IQ is inadequate, but older children might be motivated if parents explain to them the importance of IQ tests in schools.
