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Cake day: August 7th, 2024
  • zeephirus@lemmy.worldtocollapse of the old society@slrpnk.net•The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ
    13·
    2 months ago

    it was designed to help find which children needed extra help with school work!

    Binet and Simon worked closely to develop more tests and questions that would distinguish between children who did and did not need help in attending regular education. In 1905 they published a preliminary version of their test for measuring intelligence (chased by a committee set up at Bourneville’s instigation to decide on this). The full version of the test with age-appropriate standards was published in 1908 and was known as the Binet-Simon scale.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Binet#Later_career_and_the_Binet–Simon_test

    It was then used by others to push eugenics

    In 1908, H.H. Goddard, a champion of the eugenics movement, found utility in mental testing as a way to evidence the superiority of the white race. After studying abroad, Goddard brought the Binet-Simon Scale to the United States and translated it into English.

    Following Goddard in the U.S. mental testing movement was Lewis Terman, who took the Simon-Binet Scale and standardized it using a large American sample. The first test was published in 1916 and called “The Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale”. A revision was published in 1937 and now called the Stanford-Binet scale. The name of Simon was all but erased from the record and this has been the reason why Simon’s contribution to the development of the test has been overlooked in much of the 20th century and early 21st century.[14]

    The Stanford revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale was no longer used solely for advocating education for all children, as was the original objective. The new objective of intelligence testing was ultimately “curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency”.[15]