Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

Theodore (or Henri, depending on which source you read) Simon were working with children in the Paris school system at the request of the French government. Their purpose was:
    to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded. (Binet 1905)
    Their major task was to try and work out which of the children who were faring poorly in the French school system could be saved and which ones were, educationally-speaking, beyond hope. This latter group, according to Binet, included the ‘unstable’, ‘moral imbeciles’, the ‘insane’–including all those with ‘decaying sanity’ (that is to say less intelligence now than when they started, a group that included ‘many epileptics’), ‘degenerates’ and ‘idiots’.
    Interestingly he is at pains to point out the need for ‘great delicacy’ when deciding between children who are ‘unstable’ and those who simply have ‘rebellious dispositions’. After all, the symptoms –‘turbulent, vicious, rebellious to all discipline; they lack sequence of ideas, and probably power of attention’–are the same. As he points out in his paper,
New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals
:
    We have insisted upon the necessity of instructors not treating as unstable …those children whose character is not sympathetic with their own. (Binet 1905)
    The Binet–Simon test they devised involved taking a sample of children whom their teachers had identified as ‘average’ and then comparing a target child against children of the same age. Any difference of more thantwo years was deemed to be ‘subnormal’ and meant the child was in need of remedial help. The process by which the children were assessed consisted of ‘medical’, ‘pedagogical’ and ‘psychological’ methods, the latter of which included 30 different tests of increasing complexity. This third element was not designed to create a measure of intelligence because intelligence ‘cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured’ but rather ‘a measuring scale of intelligence’, comparing children of similar age, a scale ‘to determine to what degrees of the scale idiocy, imbecility, and moronity correspond’. I list the 30 tests below not just for historical interest but also to underline the extent to which intelligence testing today, and with it our own view of what clever is, are so influenced by this century-old work:
    1 ‘Le Regard’, i.e. ‘to follow with his eyes a moving object’
    2 Prehension provoked by a tactile stimulus
    3 Prehension provoked by a visual perception
    4 Recognition of food
    5 Quest of food complicated by a slight mechanical difficulty
    6 Execution of simple commands and imitation of simple gestures
    7 Verbal knowledge of objects
    8 Verbal knowledge of pictures
    9 Naming of designated objects
    10 Immediate comparison of two lines of unequal lengths
    11 Repetition of three figures
    12 Comparison of two weights
    13 Suggestibility
    14 Verbal definition of known objects
    15 Repetition of sentences of 15 words
    16 Comparison of known objects from memory
    17 Exercise of memory on pictures
    18 Drawing a design from memory
    19 Immediate repetition of figure
    20 Resemblances of several known objects given from memory
    21 Comparison of length
    22 Five weights to be placed in order
    23 Gap in weights
    24 Exercise upon rhymes
    25 Verbal gaps to be filled
    26 Synthesis of three words in one sentence
    27 Reply to an abstract question
    28 Reversal of the hands of a clock
    29 Paper cutting
    30 Definitions of abstract terms.
    I particularly like Binet’s written instructions for administering number 24. Once it has been pointed out that examples of rhyme are the way in which ‘compote’ rhymes with ‘carotte’ and ‘baton’ rhymes with both ‘macaron’ and ‘citron’, children should then be asked:
    Do you now understand what a rhyme is? Very well, you must find all the rhymes you can. The word with which you must find rhymes is ‘obéissance’. Come, begin, find some.
    (Binet 1905)
    Perhaps it was the child who passed the test who asked the examiner why he got all the easy ones.
    For our purposes it is well worth listing in full what the Frenchman knew about his work, his methods and the nature of intelligence as a whole according to the Indiana University School of Education’s website
Human Intelligence
, citing a 1992 article by R. S. Siegler entitled
The Other