A Reaction to Mental Testing in Schools

            When you hear of mental tests the first thing that might pop into your head are asylums.  In actuality though, mental tests can be given anywhere and are usually first given to people in schools; the other more common place where mental tests are given in jails and in today’s society even when applying for jobs.  These articles are more along the lines of mental testing being used in schools though.  If we give children the mental tests within their first few years of school then we may be able to tell what kind of intelligence levels they have and what kind of person they may very well grow up to be.

            Alfred Binet’s article “New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals” was quite interesting to say the least.  His purpose was to “measure the intellectual capacity of a child who was brought to us in order to know whether he was normal or disabled.”  Binet believed that most subnormal children were habitually grouped into two categories: Backward intelligence and unstable.  He also realized that there was a difference between unstable and rebellious children, so he knew they had to be careful not to diagnose the children wrong.  He recommends giving this test in a quiet isolated room with no other children around.  Binet described his psychology method in this way, “The fundamental idea of this method is the establishment of what we shall call a measuring scale of intelligence.  This scale is composed of a series of tests of increasing difficulty, starting from the, lowest intellectual level that can be observed, and ending with that of average normal intelligence.  Each group in the series corresponds to a different mental level.”

            Lewis M. Terman uses his article “The Uses of Intelligence Tests” to explain the various types of intelligence we have and what kind of people the children with these kinds of intelligence could turn out within the school systems and once they are adults.  Terman starts out by saying that Binet was wrong in thinking that there were only two intelligence levels.  Terman and a few other psychologists found there to be at least four types of intelligence levels; disabled, feeble-minded, delinquents, and superior.  When discussing the four types he explained that delinquency was actually a mental deficiency and not just a lack of morals.  He then explained that in the majority of all of the criminal cases that existed they were all delinquent and feeble-minded.  This would then mean that feeble-mindedness and delinquency are one in the same; right?  “Not all criminals are feeble-minded, but all feeble-minded are at least potential criminals.”

            They both believed that we should give children these tests and fix our educational outlook.  However, where Terman wants us to work with all the children no matter if they are disabled or superior; Binet felt that if a child was disabled then they should just stop where they are or just given the same level of work that they can handle all the time.  The high school that I went to had a program for students who were advanced in certain areas.  I am not a good test taker, so when we had to take those intelligence tests for “No Child Left Behind” I did poorly on them and they placed me in lower classes.  I went from being a B student to being an F student because those classes were just so slow and they broke things down too much for me to be able to comprehend anything.  I am an analytical/complex thinker.  I have a very hard time grasping simple context.  I had to go to my school officials and request to be placed back into my previous courses.  At first they did not believe me, but I had shown them my grades and had my teachers talk to them and then they understood and believed me.  Later I had to switch from regular English to advanced English because I had already read all of the books in the regular English curriculum and it was just boring.  I did well in all of my advanced classes, but I did horrible in the simple minded courses.

            Reading these two gentlemen was interesting and fun at the same time.  They knew what they were talking about and went straight to the point instead of putting fluff in their papers.  It is almost as though they knew that people would be looking for examples of intelligence tests within their articles so they refused to go off on tangents and their examples were small and to the point.  These two were just all around great for mental testing.