Scott Barry Kaufman
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
We say only about the child's current needs, not his future potential.
Binet said this in the manual, in the testing, the Binet manual, the original manual.
He says things like that.
We do not even begin to purport what this person is capable of.
The great tragedy of that story is that they ended up never using his tests in France.
It completely betrayed the spirit, the philosophy, the principles upon which Binet originally wanted to create the test.
Completely betrayed him.
And on his deathbed, he wrote an essay saying, the Americans have betrayed me.
Terman was very, very interested in giftedness and really had this idea in his head that genius is only recruited from the line of high IQ.
There's a lot of people involved in the early days of applying IQ tests.
It's really the application part here we're talking about, using it to sort people in America that betrayed the original philosophy.
They made it into multiple choice tests and gave it out to entire school systems.
gave it out to in the army gave it out they used it in lots of ways to send back people coming in from Ellis Island right like you know you're too feeble-minded to come to America you know never mind that a lot of these tests had verbal components to it and you're giving people who English is not their first language it's you know it's mind-boggling the extent to which
this test, which did have some potential for real utility, how much it was abused in the earliest days of use of those tests.
Mathematically, there's a formula that a lot of people started using in America, which I think is indicative of the way they thought about intelligence, right?
In order to understand the formula, you have to understand the difference between mental age and chronological age.
But they're basically saying you could be 13.
That's your chronological age in terms of your biology, in terms of your mental age can be below that or above it.
So your mental age, you could be a 13-year-old with a mental age of 7, and they called you backwards.