In This Essay

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson, Ph.D., with Lou Aronica

Alfred Binet, Wikipedia

Lewis Terman, Wikipedia

I have always been aware of ideas of intelligence and, therefore, ideas of Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.).

Unless you count a silly Internet test I took in college, I have never taken an I.Q. test. Often I have wondered what my I.Q. was, assuming as I did that I.Q. was a valid measure of intelligence. Since I did well in my scholastic subjects, I thought I would score high on an I.Q. test and I wanted in my insecurity about my own talents an objective verification of what I wanted to believe about myself but doubted.

When I moved to Ohio for college, I learned from friends that administering I.Q. tests is routine procedure in Ohio. I felt cheated then that Massachusetts did not do the same.

Now, however, having read more about the history of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, I am thankful not to have had my I.Q. measured in this way.

The Frenchman

Modern intelligence testing can trace back to some work done by a Frechman named Alfred Binet. Binet had no formal training in medicine or psychology, but was self-taught. He never held a post as a professor of psychology and this may contribute to his relative obscurity today.

His interest turned to developmental psychology after the birth of his daughters, Madeleine in 1885 and Alice two years later in 1887. His work my have influenced Jean Piaget, the famous child psychologist.

In 1899 Binet joined the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child. Five years later, the French Government commissioned the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child to create a commission for the education of retarded children and develop a method for identifying developmentally challenged individuals so that they could be given additional educational support.

The result was the Binet-Simon Scale. The original test would not resemble what I think of when I think of an I.Q. test today. A facilitator would go through a series of thirty tasks, from a simple handshake to remembering a string of random digits to making judgments about situations from vague descriptions. At the end, a child’s mental age would be estimated. Binet had determined what tasks children of a certain age should be able to perform by taking a group of children identified as average by their teachers and using them to establish the baseline.

Binet acknowledged the limitations of his scale. His scale was only valid, he said, on children from similar backgrounds and was not intended as a universal scale. He believed that intelligence was not a simple quality and was influenced environment and educational opportunities. He worked for the rest of his life to refine the scale, publishing three versions before his relatively early death at 54.

And the American

The man who is responsible for developing intelligence testing in the United States, who started from the work of Alfred Binet, was Lewis Terman. He took the Binet-Simon Scale as a starting point and adapted it, becoming known as the Stanford-Binet Scale because he was a professor at Stanford at the time he published his work on the Binet-Simon Scale, The Stanford Revision to the Binet-Simon Scale.

Reading about the beliefs of Binet and Terman, I cannot imagine they would have agreed about anything. Terman believed that intelligence was a fixed quality that could atrophy with inadequately stimulating environments or with disuse, but could never be developed beyond an inborn natural limit.

What I find most unsettling in reading about Terman is that he believed in eugenics. He believed that humans should engage in selective breeding for the betterment of the human race. One stated goal for testing was the “curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency,” (Lewis Terman et al qtd in Wikipedia).

Although he used Binet’s work as a starting point, Terman did not heed Binet’s acknowledgment of limitations of his own scale. While Binet said that results of his test were only valid if they were used on children with comparable backgrounds, Terman sought to write an universal test. After developing his test he administered it to native speakers of Spanish and poor blacks. Rather than use the results to refine his test, to see if the test accurately assessed the intelligence of his non-white subjects, he assumed his test was valid using the results to condemn the intellectual capacity of whole ethnic groups. Terman judged his Hispanic and Black subjects to be mentally inferior and more prone to crime.

Categorizing People: A Cautionary Tale

Terman took Binet’s work, which sought to assess children in order make sure they were all given appropriate instruction so that they could all receive an education, and perverted it. He wrote that the Hispanic and the Black children,

should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master [abstractions] but they can often be made effecient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.

–Lewis Terman quoted in The Element, pages 39-40.

I am afraid to think of how persistent this idea still is.

If you doubt that this idea persists, consider the following: the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, claims to predict preparedness for college. The SAT, which Ken Robinson points out was also developed by a eugenicist (The Element, page 41), has challenged as being unfair to black students, yet it continues to be used. The claims that it can predict success in college have received mixed reviews. Yet it continues to determine who gets into college.

The Lesson

I don’t believe in fixed quotients of intelligence. Evidence shows that with study and practice, individuals can change how they score on standardized tests. But I think that there is an undercurrent of testing not as a tool for assessment and course correction, but rather as an immutable ranking system.

In developing tests and thinking about using tests, we should make sure that we are using them to guide us, that we try to develop them so that they are fair, that we periodically test our tests and question our assumptions and that we recognize the limitations of testing.

Otherwise, we could be snuffing out whole constellations of bright stars.

What is the common phrasing of the Biblical proverb? “Seven years of feast, seven years of famine”?

Keeping in line with our rapidly shrinking sense of time and of being overwhelmed, when I look back on writing the Weekly Reviews, I feel like there are seven days of feast and seven days of famine.

This week has been a feast week. I emailed myself twenty-seven (27) stories for consideration for this week’s post. In fact, part of the reason why I did not post on Friday is because I had so much material to sort through.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Books Are Just Dead Trees
• The Lost Art of Reading
• Learning Takes Time
• Reminded of Mortality by Eating an Apple
• Single Parenting and Cognitive Development
• Mirror Writing

Books Are Just Dead Trees

• Openings, Jeffrey Hamburger, Boston University’s World of Ideas, WBUR via buworldofideas.org
• “My Kindle quandary”, Alison Lobron, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine via boston.com
• “The Book That Contains All Books”, Stephen Marche, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com
• “Is this the end? : Some people think book publishing is in its final throes. The Boston Book Festival begs to differ.”, Joan Anderman, The Boston Globe, via boston.com
• Nook vs. Kindle: New Chapter In E-Reader Battle, All Things Considered, NPR, via npr.org

I love the physicality of books. The weight of one in my hands. The feel of my eyes moving across the page. The sound as I turn the page. Even, to some extent, the smell of a new book as much as that of an old, musty book.

And the Kindle, as well as other ereaders, are changing that.

I have been thinking about this for a while. In fact, the first two links above are from late September and mid October. But the news that the first annual Boston Book Festival was last weekend heartens me.

I believe there will always be a place for the physical book as we know it today. And I also believe that the ancient cultures that used scrolls said much the same. At some point, probably within my lifetime, ereaders will become the dominant way that most people interact with literature.

One thing that worries me about this is the stories and research that I’ve heard about, not cited above, that reading on a screen is more difficult than reading on a page. Do the ereaders with their e-ink technology address that? I remember one review of the Amazon Kindle that disparaged its dark grey on light grey interface. The Barnes&Noble Nook will have a color screen. But at the end, are they screens with refresh rates like computer monitors and screens?

Part of the experience of reading will be lost. I studied art history at Ohio Wesleyan University and I enjoyed altarpieces that opened. The church looked one way when the altarpiece was closed and no services were going on, another when services were provided. Jeffrey Hamburger in his lecture “Openings” talks about several medieval liturgical books and their meaning in religious art and religious services.

Professor Hamburger discusses the art of some of these books that encompassed the whole scene when a book was open, others that set things in opposition between right and left pages.

He also discusses how books engross us. When a book is open on my lap, it encompasses my whole field of view. There are no buttons on the bottom to distract me. I am afraid that just as multi-tasking on computers slowly erodes our ability to concentrate on longer works, so too will ereaders.

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The Lost Art of Reading

• “The lost art of reading” by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times via latimes.com

Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.
–David L. Ulin

Not dissimilar to the articles I quote above, but I think deserving its own entry, is an article I discovered by David L. Ulin. I can’t quite remember how I found it, some Google search brought it up, perhaps when I was looking for articles related to the ones above.

I have been reading The 4-Hour Workweek, based on a review over at one of my favorite blogs, Get Rich Slowly. (Listen, when you work as a banker and spend all day with people who are working deals to make money quickly, it can be very relaxing to read about reasonable people who believe in budgeting, saving, and resisting impulse buying.) Timothy Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek argues that we micromanage our lives for the sake of feeling busy.

In some ways, David Ulin makes a similar argument. We have trouble immersing ourselves in books because our culture has become one of immediacy. We have lost the idea of cultivation. There is a meditative aspect of reading that brings us back to ourselves because of the space it gives us from the present, as well as giving us new thoughts with which to approach the present.

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Learning Takes Time

• “‘Baby Einstein’ Videos Ineffective, Study Finds”, Day to Day, NPR, via npr.org
• “Can You Make Your Baby Smarter, Sooner?”, Talk of the Nation, NPR, via npr.org
• “No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund” by Tamar Lewin, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• The Baby Einstein^TM DVD Guarantee

You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
–Warren Buffett

In the same vein, you cannot speed up the cognitive development of your child by sitting them down in front of a television. In fact, some suggest that doing so may actually have the reverse effect.

Human beings are social animals. We have grown and developed throughout time in families, tribes, and other groups. When we sit a child in front of a television, we are cutting them off from that connection and teaching them from a very young age that sitting in front of a screen is preferable to interacting with other people.

Disney is refunding money to people who bought Baby Einstein videos. The videos “have been discredited, redirecting emphasis on the importance of interaction between parents and babies for proper development.” The offer from Baby Einstein^TM

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Reminded of Mortality by Eating an Apple

Michael Doyle writes a very personal blog post here, about eating apples. I had never thought of apples, specifically, as a memento mori — another Latin phrase you think you know — but now I’m not sure I’ll ever look at an apple quite the same way.

I have linked to Michael Doyle’s Science Teacher previously, in a Weekly Review a few weeks back. He’s got an excellent blog on teaching and life. You should all take a look.

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Single Parenting and Cognitive Development

• This Is Your Brain Without Dad by Shirley S. Wang, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com
• Wikipedia Article on Degus

A German biologist, Dr. Anna Katharina Braun, studied a Chilean rodent, the degu, which is normally raised by two parents. She removed the father degu and studied the impact on brain development of the pups.

She found that the pups deprived of a father had less dense neuronal brain connections when the pups were 21 days old. The fatherless pups did gain some density by the time they were 90 days old, considered adulthood in this species, but there were still differences in the brains.

Although I do not like the emphasis on the heterogeneity of parents in this article, I was intrigued by the findings:

• “A preliminary analysis of the degus’ behavior showed that fatherless animals seemed to have a lack of impulse control, Dr. Braun says. And, when they played with siblings, they engaged in more play-fighting or aggressive behavior.”
• “In a separate study in Dr. Braun’s lab conducted by post-doctoral researcher Joerg Bock, degu pups were removed from their caregivers for one hour a day. Just this small amount of stress leads the pups to exhibit more hyperactive behaviors and less focused attention, compared to those who aren’t separated, Dr. Braun says. They also exhibit changes in their brain.”

If I’m reading one sentence right, degu parents spend about equal amounts of time with their children and the single mothers did not compensate. The scientists are attributing the decreased neuronal density to the loss of time with a parent. If the degus were raised by two mothers or two fathers who spent equivalent amounts of time with the children, what would the neuronal density look like?

So, if the important factor is the amount of time spent rearing children, then different family structures can all raise healthy children. They need to compensate for any loss of time as they are able. I would love to see more research on this that included the role of extended families, such as uncles, aunts, and grandparents.

At the end of the article, they discuss the impact of single family parenting on IQ scores. I have written elsewhere, in a few different posts, that IQ is one metric but that there are other factors in determining a children’s success than their IQ scores.

Part of what determines success is impulse control and the ability to delay gratification. The research indicates that fatherless degu pups have trouble control. If we were sure that carried over to humans, we would have a lot to worry about.

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Mirror Writing

• Writing about writing by Floyd Skloot, The Boston Globe via boston.com

I have not read anything by John Irving. But now I want to read his 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River.

One topic I touched on briefly in Sailing with Rumi — very briefly, in fact, I think it was just two sentences — is one of my personal interests: where was the writer end and the narrator begin? The review suggests that that is at the heart of this novel. John Irving writes enough parallels between himself and the novel’s Danny Angel that we are able to have this argument along with John Irving.

The metafictional, self-reflexive business is in part a tease. While inviting a reader to focus on autobiographical elements, it allows Irving, in the voice of Angel, to protest the way his “fiction had been ransacked for every conceivably autobiographical scrap’’ and “dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them.
–Floyd Skloot

What does it take for a man or a woman to engage the world through the written word? Writers take their individual life experiences and try to find the universals to which others can relate.

Literature is entertainment but equally connection. It provides us a sense of continuity, a sense of community through the opportunity to discover that we are not alone because others have either experienced or imagined what we have gone through.

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