The real purpose of a measurement is to tell facts about a situation more exactly and with greater objectiveness than they could be told in a description. A child may seem, on first appearance, to be under weight, but in order to know definitely whether or not that is true it is necessary to measure his age in terms of years, months, and days, to measure his weight in terms of pounds and ounces, and to measure his height in terms of feet and inches. All of these measurements taken together, however, will not hinder the child’s growth or make him develop more rapidly; they merely indicate what his present condition is, without reference to what it may have been in the past or what it may become in the future.
As a sample of the great benefit which may be obtained from knowing mental facts exactly, we may consider the traditions and present status of our public school systems. Education has in the past been pointed, from the very beginning in the kindergarten toward the high school and the college and ultimately the professional school in which lawyers, physicians, ministers, and teachers were to be prepared. The child who by nature was not inclined toward the consideration of abstract ideas and theories soon found that the schools were not well adapted to his interests.
The percentage of persons in our population who cannot successfully think and work with abstract symbols and verbal ideas is very much greater than most of us have been inclined to believe. We have stated or implied that any boy who would stay in school long enough might fit himself to become a United States Senator or possibly a great newspaper editor, or lawyer. Those pupils who found it impossible to assimilate the type of thing that was offered by the public schools have been eliminated and sent out into the industrial world to find materials which would correspond to their interests.
Educators have still further made the error of saying or implying that it was the inferior people who were thus forced out of school. The authors of the present book wish to assert their belief that the mind of a man whose interests lie in handling people and concrete objects is not at all inferior on that account to the mind of the man who handles ideas and abstract conceptions.
Measures of intelligence have in the past been chiefly those which would be favourable to the abstract thinker. The Alpha test, used in the Army, proved conclusively to those who studied the results most carefully, that fully half of our population can never succeed, even moderately, in the manipulation of abstract ideas. The large proportion of our boys and girls who come to school are absolutely doomed to be unsuccessful and to become discouraged in their attempts to progress in the courses which are commonly given, and yet the public supports these schools, and the administrators of these schools try to claim that they offer “equal opportunity to all.” Actually the kind of opportunity offered can be used effectively by only a small percentage of the pupils. Unless the child has the ability to interpret symbols and juggle ideas he is declared to be inferior and is forced out to learn for himself how to earn a living and to secure his rights.
The Mentimeter tests and other measures of intellectual abilities provide the means whereby pupils may be classified, at the very beginning of their education, according to the degree to which the formal academic training will be assimilated. These tests make it possible to select those who do not think abstractly but who require concrete objects or persons as the material for their mental activity. Unless the public recognizes that it owes an appropriate education to these people just as surely as it does to the academic few, it will not be long until this great group, in which our present schools develop the habit of failure and discontent, will arise to overthrow the injustices which our past aristocratic organization of society has handed on to them.
It is not proposed that certain individuals be selected by the Mentimeter tests and trained psychologists and then condemned to training of a less respectable order than that which is now offered. What is proposed is that by the use of intelligence tests students in schools be classified and placed in classes where they can learn things which it is within their mental power and interests to grasp and which will be of practical value and of social significance in the development of good citizens; rather than to continue, as we have in the past, condemning this large majority of our population to failure in school and elimination from the benefits of public taxation for education.
It is no disgrace for a blind man to be unable to paint beautiful pictures, nor is it considered a great social injustice for a man of ordinary size to be denied the opportunity of serving as a giant in a side show. It should not be considered by any one that being a good valet or mule driver or boot black or street cleaner is a less respectable calling for a man whose mind demands concrete objects for its exercise than the expounding of the gospel or explanation of legal technicalities is to the man whose mind is inclined toward abstract ideas and relationships. If we are to have an effective social organization each person must do the type of thing for which his brain and his physical body fit him, without feeling that he is thereby either inferior or superior to any other person. We must help one another, each supplying that service for which he is best fitted. To continue as we have in the past, encouraging every child to look for a “white-collar job” at the end of his educational career is to foster the monster of discontent and unrest which threatens to destroy the very foundations of modern society.
If the Mentimeter tests which follow can do no more than point out for employers and educators the limits to which those who are dependent upon them can go in the understanding and use of abstract ideas, they will thereby have contributed materially to the happiness and contentment of a weary world. Along with the results of the tests there must, however, be this feeling of responsibility for one another and the recognition of the need for “pulling together” for the common good, each man contributing that for which his inheritance has fitted him, else we shall continue to force men to learn failure and discontent in our schools and thereby destroy the social structure we have been so long in building.