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

Alfred Binet
. What’s more, the following is especially ironic given what became of his work when it was adopted and adapted in the US and beyond in the years after his death:
    Binet was upfront about the limitations of his scale. He stressed the remarkable diversity of intelligence and the subsequent need to study it using qualitative as opposed to quantitative measures. Binet also stressed that intellectual development progressed at variable rates, could be impacted by the environment and was therefore not based solely on genetics, was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be used on children with comparable backgrounds.
    (Siegler 1992)
    In other words, and I am repeating this to make sure I have understood what Binet meant as it makes me furious just typing this,
over 100 years ago
we knew that intelligence testing is limited; there is more than one way to be intelligent; we need to look at the
qualities
of intelligence, not the
quantities
; we develop at different rates even though we have the same birthdays; the environment into which we are born and in which we live will have an effect on how intelligent we end up; intelligence is not determined at – or before – birth; it is not fixed; people can become more intelligent and, if you are going to compare children, at least compare like with like.
    Anthropologist Stanley Grant once said, ‘If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilisation would presumably flunk it.’ If we knew all of the limitations of such intelligence testing in 1905, how did we end up following the shaky concept of IQ down the blind alley that it is?
    Eugenics plays a part. In 1910, Binet’s test was translated into English by the American eugenicist Henry Goddard who wanted a way of filtering out the ‘feeble-minded’ from American society. Like the Englishman and cousin to Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton, before him, he believed that intelligence, and related defects therein, was hereditary and therefore breeding was at the heart of any attempt to raise a nation’s overall intelligence. For Galton this entailed mating the clever people together, namely the well-off and well-educated. For Goddard the key was to stop the stupid people breeding and if, regrettably, forcible sterilization was not palatable to the American people the least they could do was to put them in ‘colonies’. Don’t worry though as, according to Goddard, ‘segregation and colonization is not by any means as hopeless a plan as it may seem to those who look only at the immediate increase in the tax rate.’ He claimed that such a capital investment would be more than recompensed by the savings in almshouses, prisons, psychiatric hospitals and ‘the reduction in the annual loss in property and life due to these irresponsible people’.
    In Great Britain in 1907, The Eugenics Education Society was created to spearhead a campaign to have eugenicist views more widely accepted and, as quoted in
The Making of Intelligence
by Ken Richardson (1999), a book I would make compulsory for all teachers, even the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
waded in, with one contributor asserting as fact that, ‘It is cruel to the individual, it serves no social purpose, to drag a man of only moderate intellectual power from the hand-working to the brain-working group.’ According to Richardson, the campaign led in no small way to the hugely influential 1938
Spens Report – The Report of the Consultative Committee on Secondary Education with Special Reference to Grammar Schools and Technical High Schools –
in which it was stated:
    Intellectual development during childhood appears to progress as if it were governed by a single central factor, usually known as ‘general intelligence’, which may be broadly described as innate all-round intellectual ability. It appears to enter into everything which the child attempts to think, or say, or do, and seems on the whole to be the most important factor in determining his work in the classroom. Our psychological witnesses assured us that it can be measured approximately by means of intelligence tests.
    (The Spens Report 1938)
    The report goes on to declare, ‘We were informed that, with few exceptions, it is possible at a very early age to predict with some degree of accuracy the ultimate level of a child’s intellectual powers’ before concluding that, given the evidence, ‘Different children from the age of 11, ifjustice is to be done to their varying