The idea of IQ / Russell Marks.

  • Marks, Russell.
Date:
[1981], ©1981
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The idea of IQ / Russell Marks. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/324 (page IX)
    PREFACE History in part advances as interpretative prob¬ lems are transformed into historical facts. When inter¬ pretative questions dominate the field, ideological is¬ sues are often evident. Perhaps the most common ideo¬ logical distortion occurs when the world-view of the historian is projected on the historical actor. Such distortion has been evident in contemporary discussions of the I.Q. movement as liberal, and revisionist world- views have been projected on early twentieth-century mental testers. The liberal projection has often por¬ trayed intelligence testers as modern-day progressives or as enlightened conservatives while the revisionist projection has often portrayed them as racists and ex¬ ploitive capitalists. While both interpretations pro¬ vide importait insights into the testing movemem:, they fail to do justice to the uniqueness of the mental testers ^ world-view, to the basic assumptions of the idea of I.Q. Hence these interpretations also fail to adequately describe the inherently ideological charac¬ ter of I.Q. testing, which continues to muddle think¬ ing about educational policy and social reform. The thesis of this book is that The Idea of I.Q. is based on the claim that intelligence is essentially genetic and unmalleable and that I.Q. tests measure intelligence. This claim was and continues to be legi¬ timized by evolutionary theory, democratic capitalism, nineteenth-century science, and innovative experimental methods. This claim, however, was and is conceptually confusing and empirically unwarranted, particularly in the relationship drawn between I .Q., the nature-nurture question, and educational and political reform. In formulating this thesis, the book seeks to pro¬ vide a precise description of the construct of I.Q.; to show the continuity of the construct from Lewis Ter- man to Arthur Jensen; and to provide a decisive critique of the construct. Utilizing techniques drawn from the sociology of knowledge, it seeks to extricate the idea of I.Q. from its usual political and emotional setting. Second, the study seeks to ground the I.Q. controversy -ix-