A crucial experiment would be to take a large number of very young children of the lower classes and, after placing them in the most favorable environment obtainable, to compare their later mental development with that of children born into the best homes. No extensive study of this kind has been made, but the writer has tested twenty orphanage children who, for the most part, had come from very inferior homes. They had been in a well-conducted orphanage for from two to several years, and had enjoyed during that time the advantages of an excellent village school. Nevertheless, all but three tested below average, ranging from 75 to 90 I Q.
The impotence of school instruction to neutralize individual differences in native endowment will be evident to any one who follows the school career of backward children. The children who are seriously retarded in school are not normal, and cannot be made normal by any refinement of educational method. As a rule, the longer the inferior child attends school, the more evident his inferiority becomes. It would hardly be reasonable, therefore, to expect that a little incidental instruction in the home would weigh very heavily against these same native differences in endowment. Cases like the following show conclusively that it does not:—
X is the son of unusually intelligent and well-educated parents. The home is everything one would expect of people of scholarly pursuits and cultivated tastes. But X has always been irresponsible, troublesome, childish, and queer. He learned to walk at 2 years, to talk at 3, and has always been delicate and nervous. When brought for examination he was 8 years old. He had twice attempted school work, but could accomplish nothing and was withdrawn. His play-life was not normal, and other children, younger than himself, abused and tormented him. The Binet tests gave an I Q of approximately 75; that is, the retardation amounted to about two years. The child was examined again three years later. At that time, after attending school two years, he had recently completed the first grade. This time the I Q was 73. Strange to say, the mother is encouraged and hopeful because she sees that her boy is learning to read. She does not seem to realize that at his age he ought to be within three years of entering high school.
The forty-minute test had told more about the mental ability of this boy than the intelligent mother had been able to learn in eleven years of daily and hourly observation. For X is feeble-minded; he will never complete the grammar school; he will never be an efficient worker or a responsible citizen.
Let us change the picture. Z is a bright-eyed, dark-skinned girl of 9 years. She is dark-skinned because her father is a mixture of Indian and Spanish. The mother is of Irish descent. With her strangely mated parents and two brothers she lives in a dirty, cramped, and poorly furnished house in the country. The parents are illiterate, and the brothers are retarded and dull, though not feeble-minded.
It is Z’s turn to be tested. I inquire the name. It is familiar, for I have already tested the two stupid brothers. I also know her ignorant parents and the miserable cabin in which she lives. The examination begins with the 8-year tests. The responses are quick and accurate. We proceed to the 9-year group. There is no failure, and there is but one minor error. Successes and failures alternate for a while until the latter prevail. Z has tested at 11 years. In spite of her wretched home, she is mentally advanced nearly 25 per cent. By the vocabulary test she is credited with a knowledge of nearly 6000 words, or nearly four times as many as X, the boy of cultured home and scholarly parents, had learned by the age of 8 years.
Five years have passed. When given the test, Z was in the fourth grade and, as we have already stated, 9 years of age. As a result of the test she was transferred to the fifth grade. Later she skipped again and at the age of 14 is a successful student in the second year of high school. To assay her intelligence and determine its quality was a task of forty-five minutes.
The above cases, each of which could be paralleled by many others which we have found, will serve to illustrate the fact that exceptionally superior endowment is discoverable by the tests, however unfavorable the home from which it comes, and that inferior endowment cannot be normalized by all the advantages of the most cultured home. Quoting again from Stern, “The tests actually reach and discover the general developmental conditions of intelligence, and not mere fragments of knowledge and attainments acquired by chance.”
FOOTNOTES:
[30] Dr. F. Kuhlmann: “The Binet-Simon Tests of Intelligence in Grading Feeble-Minded Children,” in Journal of Psycho-Asthenics (1912), p. 189.
[31] Dr. Otto Bobertag: “L’échelle métrique de l’intelligence,” in L’Année Psychologique (1912), p. 272.
[32] Dr. Ernest Meumann: Experimentelle Pädagogik (1913), vol. II, p. 277.
[33] Dr. W. Stern: The Psychological Methods of Testing Intelligence. Translated by Whipple (1913), p. 49.
[34] Dr. H. H. Goddard: “The Binet Measuring Scale of Intelligence; What it is and How it is to be Used,” in The Training School Bulletin (1912).