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WHEN a man of science announces that seventy millions of Americans have "little or no brains" and that "education can add nothing to their intelligence," it is perhaps time to see whether it is possible to say a word in defense of education. For if seventy millions are predestined and irretrievable fools, this democracy is probably a predestined and irretrievable failure. Even eugenics, the one hope held out, is not promising, for you can hardly expect in any visible future to breed a more intelligent race out of people who have little or no brains to transmit to their children.

Mr. Wiggam, who knows so certainly what fools most mortals are born, imagined that he was summarizing the results of the army mental tests. To be sure, Professor Yerkes, who edited the army data, thinks Mr. Wiggam's conclusions are just true enough "to make them worse than false." But that rebuke would not disturb me if I were Mr. Wiggam, for Mr. Yerkes himself says in the same article that "not more than fifty percent of our population is capable of satisfactorily completing the work of a first rate high school . . . not more than ten percent of the population is intellectually capable of meeting the requirements for a Bachelor's Degree. Education instead of increasing our intellectual capacity merely develops it and facilitates its use."

I am not quite sure I grasp the difference between "increasing" and "developing" intellectual capacity, but what I think this means is as follows: each person is born with a certain fixed capacity, which education cannot increase; second, -- and this is the core of the whole matter, -- that psychologists can measure that fixed, inborn capacity; third, that they have measured it for the whole American people; and that, therefore, they know that "not more than fifty percent ... is capable of" this and that, and "not more than ten percent" of that and this.

Now, all people may be born with a certain fixed intellectual capacity. But I do not see why anybody should either deny this hypothesis or insist upon it, unless he can prove that he has found a way of separating inborn capacity from all the effects of environment, schooling, occupation, disease, health, and opportunity.

Many of the mental testers feel that they have found a way of unscrambling the egg by the use of the army tests. If they are right in their claim, then the mental tests are a very far-reaching discovery. Their use will revolutionize our whole conception of life, because they will compel us to classify on the basis of fixed, measured hereditary endowment every child born into the world. But if the mental testers are not right in their claim, then we are dealing not with a revolutionary discovery, but with a more or less valuable development of the school and college examination paper.

The whole momentous debate turns on the question of whether the mental tests measure what a man can learn or what he can and has learned. The army examined about 1,700,000 men in many camps. It tested them in groups of between sixty and two hundred men with a series of questions which had to be covered in forty to sixty minutes. The answers given by a statistical sample of some 100,000 of these soldiers are the rock-bottom data for all these conclusions about the capacity of the American people at birth. By means of these data the inborn capacity of all Americans, all classes of Americans, and all races of Americans is supposed to have been measured. For these army psychologists, or at least the best known among them, insist that a man's score at an army camp in an hour's intelligence test at the average age of twenty-five is a reliable measure of the ability he possessed in his mother's womb. Of no account are the twenty or thirty years that elapsed from the date of conception to the particular morning when, with two or three hundred other bored, excited, or indifferent men, he was ordered to answer seven or eight series of tests at the rate of two or three minutes per series.

Conceivably the psychologists are right in their claim that his answers that morning were a measure of his native intelligence pure and simple. But if they happen to be wrong, Mr. Wiggam's generalizations are a little hasty. If the psychologists happen not to be able to measure native capacity, but only a mixture of native capacity and acquired habits, the whole gloom or doom of their conclusion breaks up and dissolves.

Now, it is inherently difficult to believe that a series of questions involving the use of language, numbers geometrical figures, grammatical constructions, logical choices, and the like, presented to men more than twenty years old, can be answered regardless of the intellectual habits acquired since infancy; for a human being begins to be affected by the environment certainly from the hour of his birth and possibly sooner. His intellectual habits begin to form very early indeed. How, then, in the present state of scientific knowledge, when it is impossible to give mental tests to embryos or babies, is any one in a position to say whether the quality of a man's memory at twenty-five or his capacity to do arithmetic or to follow directions is a pure and simple product of his inborn capacity?

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We are at the very beginning of our understanding of these things, and the last thing we are in a position to do is to make the highly theoretical, and possibly altogether unreal, distinction between native and acquired abilities. For the purposes of exact science, -- and the mental testers claim to be working as exact scientists, -- there may never be an accurately proved distinction between what is innate and what is learned until at some distant time in some weird laboratory a scientist learns how to hatch a human egg in a glass bottle, and to rear the prodigy to full manhood without human contact of any sort.

For every child born of woman inherits at once, with his biological estate, some part of the vast social heritage of mankind. Nevertheless, there is a school of psychologists, exerting great influence on the thought of the country, who assert that by the use of the army tests they can cut away the whole social heritage and measure the naked biological endowment. They claim to have done this, and to have made a census of the native capacities of the American people. Let us see how well the claim fits some of their own data.

Does schooling make a difference in intelligence scores? Mr. Wiggam says education can do nothing for most people. If that is the case, the results of the tests ought not to be influenced by schooling. Schools are not the whole of education by a long shot, and the number of years a boy spends at school is no absolute measure of the quality of the education he has received. Nevertheless, the number of years spent at school is a rough measure of the amount of his formal education. Now, in the army:

Officers had come on the average almost through the third year of college. Their median schooling was 14.7 years.

The native-born white draft had come on the average almost through grade seven. Their median schooling was 6.9 years.

The foreign-horn white draft had come on the average almost through grade five. Their median schooling was 4.7 years.

The Northern negro draft had also come on the average through grade five. Their median schooling was 4.9 years.

The Southern negro draft had come on the average through grade three. Their median schooling was 2.6 years.

How do the number of years at school compare with the intelligence test scores in the alpha examination, alpha being the test for English-speaking literates? The figures show that:

Officers with 14.7 years schooling made median score of 139.2
Native whites with 6.9 years schooling made median score of 58.9
Foreign whites with 4.7 years schooling made median score of 46.7
Northern negroes with 4.9 years schooling made median score of 38.6
Southern negroes with 2.6 years schooling made median score of 12.4

Thus in the case of

Officers. A year's schooling was worth roughly 9.46 points on intelligence score
Native whites. A year's schooling was worth roughly 8.53 points on intelligence score
Foreign whites. A year's schooling was worth roughly 9.93 points on intelligence score
Northern negroes. A year's schooling was worth roughly 7.87 points on intelligence score
Southern negroes. A year's schooling was worth roughly 4.76 points on intelligence score

All the whites in this table are less than one and a half points apart on the intelligence scores per year of schooling. The Northern negroes are only two thirds of a point behind the native whites. The Southern negroes, on the other hand, score only about half as many points per year of schooling as the officers or the foreign whites. If we may assume that each year of schooling is as good as any other, these differences may represent measures of different native abilities. But that is to assume that practice in taking written examinations like the army tests is not cumulative. Yet until we can discount this factor of practice, we are in no position to reach a conclusion as to what these differences represent.

The correspondences are, of course, true only for the average of large groups. The figures do not mean that you can predict any man's score by multiplying the number of years of schooling by approximately 8.9. A man's capacity to learn and a school's capacity to teach are not so uniform as that. For each particular man the score will vary in accordance with factors which we cannot separate, such as his native endowment, his physical and emotional development, his infantile development, and the quality of the schooling he has received. But the figures do mean that in large groups the average scores will correspond fairly closely with even so crude a measure of education as the time spent at school.

The psychologists, of course, noted this fact. They found a positive correlation ranging from +.65 to +.81. There were, then, three conceivable ways of interpreting these facts. The psychologists could have said that in general the more schooling, the better the score. They could have said that while schooling alone did not determine the score, it was certainly a powerful influence. Either interpretation would, however, have knocked out their claim that the tests measure native ability pure and simple. They have, in fact, chosen to argue not that schooling affects the scores, but that the scores indicate how many years of school each group was capable of completing.

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They assert that virtually all men stay in school as long as their native ability enables them to stand the intellectual strain. Therefore, those who never went to college are inherently incapable of going to college. Those who never went to high school have not the capacity to go to high school. Consequently, the men's scores did not rise and fall with the amount of their schooling. They had more or less schooling, corresponding to better or worse scores, because they were born superior or inferior men.

It is not necessary to reply that every person is capable of completing a college course in order to offer this theory as a blue-ribbon exhibit of the determination to hold a theory in the teeth of the facts. Nobody in his senses thinks that schools are the whole of education, or that education is all powerful. It is only necessary to say that education makes some difference in the result of an intelligence test to destroy the claim that the tests measure native ability pure and simple.

To refute the argument that the amount of schooling affects the score, the thoroughgoing testers offer what Dr. Carl C. Brigham describes as "a crucial test." They compare the scores of 660 officers who had never gone beyond the eighth grade in school with the alpha scores of 13,943 native-born recruits, all of whom had gone beyond the eighth grade. The median scores are as follows:

The first thing to note about these figures is that the officers, being able to complete more schooling, should, on the psychologists' theory, have had more schooling. They did not get it for some unstated reason, which goes to show that other causes besides inability to stand the strain operate to reduce the amount of schooling men receive. The second thing to note is that the difference between these officers and these men is vastly less than the difference between all officers and all men.

The difference in median scores between officers with eight years schooling less and men with eight years schooling or more is about ten points. The difference between all officers, with an average schooling of nearly 15 years, and all men, with an average schooling of nearly seven years, is over 79 points.

And the third thing to note is that we have not the vaguest notion who these 660 officers were, or what they and the recruits with whom they are compared did with their time between the day they left school and the day they were tested.

When we have noted all these things, we may very well admit as an hypothesis that a difference of native ability existed, though how much difference we have no way of knowing. The "crucial test," then, seems to me a considerable failure as a proof that the scores are not affected by education. It is a complete failure, in fact, if the scores are in any appreciable degree affected by education. Those of us who reject this dogma do not claim that native ability is no factor in the result. We claim that it is an unknown factor. If it is not the only factor, we win our case against these mental testers who have committed themselves to the task of proving a negative. They say education does not affect the scores at all. We say it affects the scores in some unknown degree.

One of the curiosities of a work like Dr. Brigham's is that he uses the army data for almost every kind of comparison except one. He makes comparisons between officers and men, between whites and negroes, between native and foreign born, northern Europeans and southern Europeans, but none between the States of the Union, and none between sections of the country. For some reason the army editors also left that comparison alone.

Yet the sectional differences are very striking. Using the median alpha scores for white soldiers worked out by Mr. Herbert B. Alexander of Stanford University, I have grouped the States according to geographical sections. If what follows seems to present some invidious comparisons to the reader, I can only say that I do not interpret these figures, as the mental testers do, as indications of native superiority and inferiority.

How do these scores compare with the school systems of the different groups of States? The recognized measure for state school systems is known as Ayres' Index. This index measures ten facts about the schools: the per cent. of school population attending school daily; the average days attended by each child of school age; the average number of days schools were kept open; the per cent. that high-school attendance was of total attendance; the per cent. that boys were of girls in high school; the average annual expenditure per child attending; the average annual expenditure per child of school age; the average annual expenditure per teacher employed; the expenditure per pupil for purposes other than teachers' salaries; and the expenditure per teacher for salaries.

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Taking 1900 as the year when the average soldier was at school, what is the average index for these groups of States?

Now, in this list the New England States rank third on the tests, second in education; the East North Central States fifth in both; the West North Central fourth in tests, sixth in education; the Mountain States second in tests, fourth in education; the Pacific States first in tests, third in education; the Mid-South Atlantic States seventh in both the South Atlantic ninth in tests, tenth in education; the East South Central tenth in tests, ninth in education; the West South Central eighth in both.

The one group in which the correspondence is not pretty close is the Mid-Atlantic group, consisting of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This group ranks first in education, but only sixth in the tests. The black sheep in this group is, for some strange reason, New Jersey, with an intelligence test score (48.7) far below any other Northern State. The Mid-Atlantic group without New Jersey would rank fourth rather than sixth, ahead of all regions except New England and the Far-Western groups.

These figures are based on the school systems of the year 1900. They may measure roughly the efficiency of the schools in that year.

But suppose we ask ourselves which school systems were most progressive relative to the others? For it is a fair assumption that a school system which is improving is likely to be better in quality than one which is just holding its own.

If you rank these groups of States in the order in which, according to the material furnished by Ayres' Index, they made the greatest gains from 1890 to 1918, you arrive at the following result:

Now this would seem to argue that schools on the whole produce better scores in the intelligence tests. But if it does, the claim of the testers that they measure the original endowment of the racial stock collapses. Therefore, in order to overcome the correlation between schooling and scores, it becomes necessary for the tester to argue that superior stock is responsible for high scores and good schools, inferior stock for poorer scores and poorer schools.

Before we accept any such far-fetched conclusion, it is well to exhaust the common-sense explanations. Schools cost money. Is there any correspondence between the rank of these groups of States in intelligence scores, school improvement, and per capita income?

The really striking thing about this table is the great difference in per capita income between the three groups of Southern States and all the others. They all fall below $500, whereas no other group, except the Mid-South Atlantic is below $600. That may be an explanation of why their school systems are the poorest, and this in turn may be some part of the explanation of why their intelligence tests are the poorest.

In order to explain away these figures, your radical tester has to argue that poorer scores, poorer schools, and less wealth are all the results of inferior stock. The intelligence scores, remember, are for the white draft only, the educational index and income are, of course, for both negroes and whites. Probably, if negro schools were omitted from the figures for the Southern States, their educational index would improve somewhat, but not enough, I believe, to alter the general result. On the other hand, separating negro and white schools in the South would almost certainly tend to make a closer correspondence between the intelligence test of the Southern negro and his educational opportunities.

The testers are all the time talking about superior and inferior stocks. Their explanation of the whole business is in these terms. They claim that officers as a class are biologically superior to the native white men, the native white men biologically superior to the foreign-born whites from Ireland and southeastern Europe, the recent immigrants superior to the negroes, the Northern negroes superior to the Southern. They speak of racial superiority when they mean superiority in the intelligence tests, for they are determined to believe that the tests measure the quality of the race rather than a mixture of race, opportunity, and education.

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Their determination to believe this requires some of the most ingenious explaining that scientists with a resolute purpose ever had to employ. We have already seen how they explain away the school systems of the United States. Professor Carl C. Brigham of Princeton University has made what he calls "A Study of American Intelligence." Mr. Brigham devotes two pages of his book on intelligence to the subject of education.

What he is out to prove is that the foreign born who have come in the last twenty years are an inferior stock. Apparently it never occurred to him, however, to compare scores in the intelligence tests with the percentage of foreign born in the different States. Had he done this, he would have got this rather strange result:

The percentage of native-born of white native parentage in

North Carolina is 99 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 43.2
New York is 36 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 64.5
South Carolina is 97.5 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 47.4
Massachusetts is 33.2 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 71.6
Georgia is 97.2 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 42.2
Pennsylvania is 56.5 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 65.1
Tennessee is 96.7 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 47.2
Illinois is 47.1 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 63.8
Mississippi is 96.3 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 41.2
Ohio is 65.2 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 67.3
Alabama is 95.8 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 46.3
Rhode Island is 30 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 62.9
Arkansas is 95.3 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 41.6
Michigan is 44 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 63.3
Oklahoma is 90.7 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 52.5
Connecticut is 36 and the median alpha intelligence score for whites is 73.6

The Northern States in this list are ones in which the bulk of the recent immigration has tended to settle. The Southern States are those with over ninety per cent. native whites of native parentage. These figures do not prove, as a hasty psychologist might think, that immigration has improved intelligence. They simply reduce to an absurdity, in my judgment, the argument that the tests measure native ability alone. If schools, opportunity, and wealth are of no consequence, if the native whites of native parentage are inherently superior, and if the tests really measure superiority, the figures in every bracket of that table ought to be reversed. When the psychologists compare the foreign born with the native they find, as one would expect, that the native average is higher than the foreign average. But they find also one fact that makes their whole case extremely difficult to handle. They find that if you group the foreign born according to the number of years they have been in the United States, then the difference between native and foreign born gradually disappears entirely as the length of residence increases. On what is called the "combined scale," which includes the English speakers and the foreign language groups, the literate and the illiterate, the average score of the native-born whites was 13.77. Compare this figure with the average for the foreign born:

In America 0 to 6 years averaged 11.41
In America 6 to 10 years averaged 11.74
In America 11 to 16 years averaged 12.47
In America 16 to 20 years averaged 13.55
In America over 20 years averaged 13.82
In America the native born averaged 13.77

If any one thinks this ascending curve of the scores of the foreign born in accordance with the time spent in our American environment is a sign of what we call roughly Americanization, he has not reckoned with the Psychological Battalion of Death. Dr. Brigham insists that the scores improved with the time spent in America because each group of immigrants in the last twenty years has been biologically inferior to the preceding group.

The idea that soldiers who had been here over twenty years had been wholly educated in American schools, while soldiers who had recently arrived from Ellis Island had probably never been to any American school, is to Dr. Brigham and his associates an unacceptable explanation of a very striking set of facts. They are determined that education and opportunity shall not count, "for we must -sic- assume," says Dr. Brigham, "that we are measuring native or inborn intelligence." To this we can reply that there is no law compelling professors to assume the very thing which they set out to prove. They are quite free to assume nothing and to conclude, if the facts point that way, that they are measuring very crudely some aspects of the mixture of native ability and acquired habits.

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That is in fact all that modest and critical psychologists claim for the tests. But, unfortunately, the modest and critical, on whom the future development of tests depends, have remained in the background, while their rasher colleagues have offered to the public a yellow science. The headline professors, be it said, to the dismay and chagrin of the true scientists in this field, have succeeded for the moment in producing something like a panic, using misleading statistics to destroy confidence in the value and possibilities of education.

There is no reason to lose confidence. The facts point with compelling force to the conclusion that where there are good schools, opportunity, health, and wealth, there also will be found greater ability as measured by the intelligence tests. When the average position for each of forty-one States is found, says Mr. Alexander, from the rankings for per cent. of urban population, ownership of farms, average wage for farm labor, literacy and Ayres' school indices and the correlation of this combined rank-order is made with the alpha army tests, the resulting coefficient is 89 out of a possible 100.

That is plenty high enough to justify us in repudiating the dogmatism of those who preach the predestined incapacity of an overwhelming majority of the nation. Even by their own measuring scale education works. There is, then, no slightest reason for losing faith in the one human activity which amidst all the bewilderment of these times gives the most certain promise of a better world.

That promise would fail if among teachers, parents, children, and taxpayers the doctrine took root that every child is earmarked at birth for a certain predestined niche in the scale of intelligence. That is a doctrine as yet without scientific foundation, which can produce nothing but discredit for psychology, fatalism and paralysis in the schools, injustice in society, and unnecessary despair or unwarranted conceit among the persons who are tested.