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Is America Feeble-minded?

Creator: Horace B. English (author)
Date: October 15, 1922
Publication: The Survey
Source: Available at selected libraries

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"THERE are so many stupid people!" has been the burden of recent comment from every side since the results of the intelligence tests applied to the army became public property. Can democracy survive, let alone flourish, asks Cornelia James Cannon in The Atlantic, with twenty-two per cent of our citizens of "inferior intelligence?" H. L. Mencken in the Baltimore Sun, by misquoting this writer, gleefully reaches the astonishing conclusion that all his previous estimates of American stupidity were too low, since official figures prove that over 47 per cent of the white draft, and an even larger per cent of the negroes, are feeble-minded. The New York Times editorially quotes a state commissioner of education to the same effect, while Collier's optimistically points to the 53 per cent who are not mentally deficient. But if this be all, we may well despair of democracy.

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A veritable swarm of mental tests has followed the successful application of intelligence tests in the army. Psychologists and pseudo-psychologists of all grades of ability and of none contributed to this swarm. You had only to open your Sunday newspaper to find a new test to try out on the members of your family, or an account of the newest prodigy to solve all the problems. The technical journals of psychology were scarcely less forward. In school and industry there was a positive boom in intelligence tests. Of late this sort of thing has somewhat fallen off, but its place has been taken by more or less serious efforts to interpret the monumental data obtained from the examination of one and three-quarter million soldiers.

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After all this storm and stress, has not the time arrived for the still, small voice? Tests weathered the period of irrational criticism and, not wholly unscathed, came through the period of hurried application. Yet if test results continue to be taken at their face value, their proponents may have to cry "save us from our friends." The critics are so appreciative of the significance of the army tests that the duty of taking them to task for misleading deductions is peculiarly ungrateful. But neither psychology nor the social sciences can permanently benefit from an injudicious use of the data yielded by this epoch-making experiment in human measurement and selection.

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What "Inferiority" Means

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The apparently large per cent of army recruits of "inferior intelligence" is simply enough explained. The average person, as F. P. A. points out, is considerably above the average. Now for statisticians, who are matter of fact individuals, this will not do; "average" means the attainment of those who are half way between the top and the bottom. Similarly with "superior " and "inferior." Without the slightest reference to absolute standards (which in the matter of intelligence do not exist), the army psychologists simply dubbed "inferior" that fifth (roughly) of all the recruits who made the lowest score, "superior" and "very superior" the uppermost fifth, and "average" the three-fifths in between.

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As psychologists they should have known that "inferior" would carry an emotional significance; perhaps for army purposes this meaning was desirable. At any rate, by the same methods a fifth of the Fellows of the British Association or of the Immortals of the French Academy could be classed as inferior." So far as this particular result is concerned, therefore, the army results tell us nothing save that our citizenry is not intellectually homogeneous, and that some men are measurably more intelligent than others. This surely needs no demonstration by a corps of psychological savants nor does it justify doleful misgivings as to the working of democracy.

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But what about the generalization that the army tests showed half of the population to be less than thirteen years in mental age? What may we expect of voters so infantile? The expression "mental age" is seductively simple; it seems so unambiguous. Mental age 10 seems to imply intellectual powers, judgment, and behavior like a ten-year-old. Now this is not what the tests prove and not what any competent psychologist from Binet onward has meant by the term. Mental age is merely a conventional expression indicating a certain rather arbitrary attainment in the tests. Such a rating may, indeed, be taken as determining the level of general intelligence of the person examined, but general intelligence is not the same thing as judgment or wisdom, though these interpenetrate; nor is general intelligence the sole factor determining behavior, though perhaps the chief.

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Let the adult reader reflect that he himself probably ceased to develop in that somewhat mysterious group of functions lumped together under the caption of general intelligence, when somewhere between fourteen and eighteen years of age. Yet it is fairly certain that he does not behave like his adolescent self. Psychologists may demonstrate that he has not developed in intelligence; but this does not preclude development in judgment, in wisdom, and in knowledge, both theoretical and practical.

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