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They assert that virtually all men stay in school as long as their native ability enables them to stand the intellectual strain. Therefore, those who never went to college are inherently incapable of going to college. Those who never went to high school have not the capacity to go to high school. Consequently, the men's scores did not rise and fall with the amount of their schooling. They had more or less schooling, corresponding to better or worse scores, because they were born superior or inferior men.

It is not necessary to reply that every person is capable of completing a college course in order to offer this theory as a blue-ribbon exhibit of the determination to hold a theory in the teeth of the facts. Nobody in his senses thinks that schools are the whole of education, or that education is all powerful. It is only necessary to say that education makes some difference in the result of an intelligence test to destroy the claim that the tests measure native ability pure and simple.

To refute the argument that the amount of schooling affects the score, the thoroughgoing testers offer what Dr. Carl C. Brigham describes as "a crucial test." They compare the scores of 660 officers who had never gone beyond the eighth grade in school with the alpha scores of 13,943 native-born recruits, all of whom had gone beyond the eighth grade. The median scores are as follows:

The first thing to note about these figures is that the officers, being able to complete more schooling, should, on the psychologists' theory, have had more schooling. They did not get it for some unstated reason, which goes to show that other causes besides inability to stand the strain operate to reduce the amount of schooling men receive. The second thing to note is that the difference between these officers and these men is vastly less than the difference between all officers and all men.

The difference in median scores between officers with eight years schooling less and men with eight years schooling or more is about ten points. The difference between all officers, with an average schooling of nearly 15 years, and all men, with an average schooling of nearly seven years, is over 79 points.

And the third thing to note is that we have not the vaguest notion who these 660 officers were, or what they and the recruits with whom they are compared did with their time between the day they left school and the day they were tested.

When we have noted all these things, we may very well admit as an hypothesis that a difference of native ability existed, though how much difference we have no way of knowing. The "crucial test," then, seems to me a considerable failure as a proof that the scores are not affected by education. It is a complete failure, in fact, if the scores are in any appreciable degree affected by education. Those of us who reject this dogma do not claim that native ability is no factor in the result. We claim that it is an unknown factor. If it is not the only factor, we win our case against these mental testers who have committed themselves to the task of proving a negative. They say education does not affect the scores at all. We say it affects the scores in some unknown degree.

One of the curiosities of a work like Dr. Brigham's is that he uses the army data for almost every kind of comparison except one. He makes comparisons between officers and men, between whites and negroes, between native and foreign born, northern Europeans and southern Europeans, but none between the States of the Union, and none between sections of the country. For some reason the army editors also left that comparison alone.

Yet the sectional differences are very striking. Using the median alpha scores for white soldiers worked out by Mr. Herbert B. Alexander of Stanford University, I have grouped the States according to geographical sections. If what follows seems to present some invidious comparisons to the reader, I can only say that I do not interpret these figures, as the mental testers do, as indications of native superiority and inferiority.

How do these scores compare with the school systems of the different groups of States? The recognized measure for state school systems is known as Ayres' Index. This index measures ten facts about the schools: the per cent. of school population attending school daily; the average days attended by each child of school age; the average number of days schools were kept open; the per cent. that high-school attendance was of total attendance; the per cent. that boys were of girls in high school; the average annual expenditure per child attending; the average annual expenditure per child of school age; the average annual expenditure per teacher employed; the expenditure per pupil for purposes other than teachers' salaries; and the expenditure per teacher for salaries.