Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

58 Language Diversity in the Classroomscholarly caution is commendable, I think the case for religious zealunderpinning eugenic and assessment interests is compelling. There is,after all, a logic here. A belief that most of human intellectual capacity isa fixed matter, a concern for the efficient classification of human wheatand chaff that ‘objective’ testing seems to offer, and a sense that the bestshould be encouraged and the worst restrained these and relatedassumptions are ideological rather than scientific in nature, and theideology in question is clearly religious in origin.Some have argued that a marriage of Calvinistic conceits and‘scientific’ determinism necessarily implies considerably less interventionthan Victorian scholars were in fact committed to. If all ispredestined, for instance, why bother with education? Thus, in a seriesof papers in The New Republic, Walter Lippmann levelled many criticismsat the eugenics and testing movement; the famous American columnistargued at one point that its influence meant that ‘the task of educationhad given way to the doctrine of predestination and infant damnation’(Lippmann, 1922: 298); see also below. Apart from the fact thatarguments about religious predestination are many and nuanced, allthe early intelligence testers would have said that, whatever theirlimitations, people ought to exert themselves as best they could, andother more fortunate souls should feel obliged to assist. Besides, as White(2006b: 48) has noted, ‘none of them held that high innate ability isenough on its own. For Galton, one also needs ‘‘the habits of selfdisciplineand industry’’... Burt and Terman agreed with him’. So didthey all, in fact. Even those espousing a strongly hereditarian position,then, could allow for some environmental fine-tuning. And as well, ofcourse, there were also those divine injunctions relating to industryversus idleness, to making sure that the devil found no work forunemployed hands.While the evaluators of intelligence naturally measured along a scale,they were always (as White notes) particularly interested in the extremes.Galton argued, for instance, that ‘an average man is morally andintellectually an uninteresting being’ (Pearson, 1924: 384). The greatestinterest will clearly attach to the intelligent élite (who now represent thereligious few, the ‘elect’) and to those at the opposite end of the IQcontinuum (who can now stand in for the many, the damned). Naturally,the evaluators themselves were always in the first select group; as for theothers, they were ‘democracy’s ballast, not always useless but always apotential liability’ (Terman, 1922: 658).I began here by noting that the equation of ‘Galtonism’ with racismhas generally been seen as inaccurate. A reassessment by Brookes (2004),