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

capacities, require types of education varying in certain important respects’.
    The principal ‘psychological witness’ to which the report refers is the controversial English educational psychologist Cyril Burt, whose later research has been equally controversially discredited. Burt was a member of the British Eugenics Society 1 (as the Eugenics Education Society had become in 1926) and was the author of a 1909 paper which, according to Wikipedia at least, concluded that ‘upper-class children in private preparatory schools did better in the tests than those in the ordinary elementary schools, and that the difference was innate’. In his 1963 report ‘Is intelligence distributed normally?’ on the subject of the normal curve of distribution of intelligence, he stated that:
    Subsequent work in genetics has since furnished strong theoretical grounds for believing that innate mental abilities are not distributed in exact conformity with the normal curve. So far as they are inborn, individual differences in general intelligence are apparently due to a large number of genes of varying influence.
    (Burt 1963)
    Compare that with this more scientifically enlightened quote from a twenty-first century professor Robert Winston:
    The kind of child you have depends almost entirely on how you bring it up. Genes and inherited dispositions are pieces of trivia really.
    To say that we can measure people at a given time, before their brain has fully matured, and determine how clever or stupid they are, or ever will be, is like determining how good a driver a person is before they have had a lesson. Yes, I understand that not everyone will become a great driver and some will be better than others. What’s more, some will learn quickly and others will not pass a test until their fifth attempt. That said, all will be better than when they started. A few years ago I started to learn to sail (partly to fulfil an ambition and partly, after spending so much of my life on the UK’s motorways doing this job, to give myself the chance of dying romantically and not on the M62). Learning so many new facts and skills was something I found quite an immense challenge but, on seeing what was going on at sea and in marinas around the country, I consoled myself with the fact that that if stupid people could learn to sail then so could I. As Binet was trying to prove, intelligence is malleable – if we teach children to be cleverer then they will be cleverer. Isn’t that the point of education in the first place? What’s more, Binet was adamant that his testswere not tests of potential but a way of taking snapshots of an individual’s mental faculties
at the time of the tests
. As he declared in
New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals
, his aim was to assess simply whether the child was ‘normal or retarded’ and that was all:
    We should therefore, study his condition at the time and that only. We have nothing to do either with his past history or with his future. … We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state.
    (Binet 1905)
    The eugenics-influenced Spens Report is a very interesting, wide-ranging and thorough overview of the state of education and children’s development that had far-reaching implications, the reverberations of which are still sounding throughout the UK today. For example, one of its recommendations was what became the ‘11+’:
    We believe that the examination is capable of selecting in a high proportion of cases those pupils who quite certainly have so much intelligence and intelligence of such a character that without doubt they ought to receive a secondary education of the grammar school type, and also those pupils who quite certainly would not benefit from such an education.
    (The Spens Report 1938)
    So, as a result of the works and influence of people like Galton and Goddard, we ended up with the 11+ and secondary moderns, a selective two-tier school system and a lot of people with chips on their shoulders who feel they were made to feel like failures at the age of 11. However, it could have been worse. In his 1913 publication,
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness,
in the chapter entitled ‘What is to be done’ you can discern a certain frustration in Goddard’s tone when he writes:
    For the low-grade idiot, the loathsome unfortunate that may be seen in our institutions, some have proposed the lethal