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A Defense Of Education

Creator: Walter Lippmann (author)
Date: May 1923
Publication: The Century Magazine
Source: Available at selected libraries

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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