As for parents, it would of course be unreasonable to expect from them a very accurate judgment regarding the mental peculiarities of their children. The difficulty is not simply that which comes from lack of special training. The presence of parental affection renders impartial judgment impossible. Still more serious are the effects of habituation to the child’s mental traits. As a result of such habituation the most intelligent parent tends to develop an unfortunate blindness to all sorts of abnormalities which exist in his own children.
The only way of escape from the fallacies we have mentioned lies in the use of some kind of refined psychological procedure. Binet testing is destined to become universally known and practiced in schools, prisons, reformatories, charity stations, orphan asylums, and even ordinary homes, for the same reason that Babcock testing has become universal in dairying. Each is indispensable to its purpose.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] See p. 169 ff. of reference [2], at end of this book
[9] See p. 182 ff. of reference [2] at end of this book.
CHAPTER III
DESCRIPTION OF THE BINET-SIMON METHOD
Essential nature of the scale.
The Binet scale is made up of an extended series of tests in the nature of “stunts,” or problems, success in which demands the exercise of intelligence. As left by Binet, the scale consists of 54 tests, so graded in difficulty that the easiest lie well within the range of normal 3-year-old children, while the hardest tax the intelligence of the average adult. The problems are designed primarily to test native intelligence, not school knowledge or home training. They try to answer the question “How intelligent is this child?” How much the child has learned is of significance only in so far as it throws light on his ability to learn more.