A Reminiscent Prelude

I remember very vividly throughout my youth the rhythmic system of testing the ruled the education landscape. Having been a student at the height of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), high stakes testing was all the rage. Every April I remember distinctly yearning for testing season to begin. For a kid that certainly had no affinity nor inherent talent in the public school system, I adored sitting down and being left alone for multiple days in a row. The tangy taste of Goldfish given to us during our breaks; The refreshing nourishment provided by the tiny water bottles, which were promptly taken to a landfill en masse. There's just not a better feeling than that.

Entering high school, though, this feeling quickly dissipated. Now these tests actually mattered. They determined how my future would end up, and for a student who did not particularly like school, these PSATs, ACTS, mandatory SAT Prep courses all led to feelings of self-doubt, inadequacy, and the deafening slamming of doorways to greater opportunity. Of course now I realize that this could not be further from the truth, but it goes to show how profound of an impact these tests effect a student's sense of self-worth. Today, though the landscape has changed significantly, mandatory college entrance examinations like the SAT and ACT impact my students in much the same way.

When taking my EdPsych course this past summer for my master's degree in Educational Administration and Leadership, I was again reminded of the terrors of intelligence and aptitude tests, and the effects they have on children throughout history. Aptitude tests as a whole possess inherent issues in equity by limiting and even targeting students of color and students who are economically disadvantaged.

This whole story is certainly nothing new. Intelligence tests and the like have horrifying use-cases since their very inception by upholding the tenets of scientific racism and monetary hegemony. Let's go through a quick history.

Binet’s Early Intelligence Test

It was Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon who created the first intelligence test. Originally consisting of 30 questions of increasing "difficulty", the test grew rapidly in popularity throughout the psychological community. These tests would be given to children in order to see how they compare to other age ranges amongst students. The goal was not necessarily to help these children with targeted interventions to help improve their learning, but rather these tests were made simply to identify children who were below "normal". In his writing, Binet clearly states the purpose of the test is to categorize children based on how well they do on this test. He specifically states in 1905 that this is where the test begins and ends:

Our purpose is in no wise to study, analyze, or set forth the aptitudes of those of inferior intelligence. That will be the object of a later work. Here we shall limit ourselves to the measuring of their general intelligence. We shall determine their intellectual level, and, in order the better to appreciate this level, we shall compare it with that of normal children of the same age or of an analogous level.

Perhaps one of the largest problems of this test was the cultural dependence of it's questions. Consider the following question for 25. Verbal Gaps to be Filled:

The women gather up the large sheets which are as stiff as though they had been [...]

If you had answered "starched" then you would be correct.

Obviously, this question may perhaps be incredibly confusing to some of you in this day in age, who have solely used detergent and and fabric softener in your washing machine. Clearly, the question relies on the listener already having a cultural association with how laundry is cleaned in the western world. It implies that people unfamiliar starching laundry (like myself and others all around the world) have a developmental deficiency.

This problem comes at no surprise given that the scientific and cultural landscape in the West was engrossed by the concept of racial and ethnic dominance over others. If you did not understand questions that were made by a western culture, then you were developmentally delayed just by being raised in another part of the globe.

IQ and the US Army

When the First World War began, these tests became further institutionalized in order to recruit and categorize soldiers based on their "mental age" or the newly coined concept, intelligence quotient (IQ). Stephen Jay Gould in his monograph The Mismeasure of Man dives into the inherent racism that these tests led to in American society. Yerkes' IQ tests, Gould states, led to a greater ideology of the time that IQ was inheritable, which fit insidiously within the American social context which was dominated by racism and Social Darwinism. It should come to no surprise that establishing and IQ of different races, would perpetuate societal inequities, and even further fuel the pseudo-scientific bunk that eugenicists thrive upon.

What may come is a surprise is that Carl Brigham, who helped create Yerkes' army tests in the 1910s, would be the one who took this knowledge to schools when inventing the SAT. Covering vocabulary and arithmetic, the 315 question SAT was unveiled and given to thousands of students in 1926. The same inequities that were reinforced by Yerkes' test were further perpetuated in schools. Not only did the biases of the test prevent many students of color from being accepted into a university based on score alone, it also served as an obstacle for students to receive scholarship money to afford a particular college in the first place.

Chomsky Problematizes

Richard Herrnstein, co-author of the problematic text The Bell Curve (1994), utilized these IQ tests in order to create the argument that different social classes and races possess an inherited IQ, which (he states) explains social racial inequity within America. Harking back to the eugenicist rhetoric of the early 1900s, this is a preposterous and disgusting argument that is predicated upon many assumptions that can be easily thwarted.

Noam Chomsky dismantles Herrnstein's argument by effectively usurping the argument at it’s core. Herrnstein first assumes that people simply work to gain wealth and power. As a working teacher, I can anecdotally tell you that this is false. Chomsky also points at the social-constructedness of race by effectively stating that it is absolutely useless to assign a mean IQ to an entire race, but only a racist society would find value within these numbers. It is much more important to look at individuals as individuals rather than as representations for an entire group. IQ tests are an incredibly dangerous tool used to oppress those of different races and social classes, and was quickly taken up by social-Darwinists, eugenicists, and racists alike to “prove” their varied agendas.

The post-modern thought is precisely what was needed to effectively break down the inconsistencies of societal presuppositions that are inherently false.

Today's Multiple Intelligences

This all leads us to contemporary conceptions of intelligence. Though college admissions and other aptitude tests are still widely utilized in order to graduate high school, many colleges are now "test-optional" when completing their application process. This still does not serve to help those applying for scholarships in order to make college more affordable, but is certainly a step take to erode the foothold of aptitude and intelligence examinations within the American school system.

In 1983, Harvard University professor Howard Gardner coined the concept of multiple intelligences. Over the last few decades, nine intelligence modalities have been defined with room for expansion as time goes on. Though perhaps illusive and subjective, the concept in and of itself has taken a strong hold in extant educational psychology. You may have heard of this theory ad nauseam in your professional development about the wonderful world of learning styles, but Gardner has been consistently trying to distance his work on multiple intelligences from this. This is perhaps a deep-dive for another time.

This all goes to show that intelligence is not simply one monolithic term that defines how "smart" or not a person truly is. To be "intelligent" in the colloquial sense is a culturally loaded and problematic concept that assumes that there is only one true intelligence that people should care about. Luckily, the world seems to be slowly moving on from this idea. This is why "growth mindset" has become such unabating buzzword in the educational sphere.

Throughout history, the American educational system has been a petri dish for racial and social inequity, but educators all over the world are working tirelessly to rectify this with groundbreaking classroom methodologies, philosophies, and research. With enough time and healing, we can hopefully bring education to new heights as we gain a further understanding of how each of us can thrive as learners, rather than defining them by an assigned number.

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