Library Collections: Document: Full Text

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.