On the Dark History and Ongoing Ableist Legacy of the IQ Test

In the fourteen years since I earned my Ph.D. and became an art history professor, I have witnessed a rapid reorganization of the purpose and values of higher education that has left me wondering about my place in it. I have a career that I am proud of, and I believe that what I teach improves my students’ lives in intangible and pragmatic ways. But I have struggled to define where research and writing on history fit in this new world of higher education that peddles in the promises of instant post-graduation success and return on investment. A few years ago, I began to lose sight of why research matters.

Historical research is vital to higher education and to the world at large. But meaningful connections are often hard to see. Research can look like an elitist pursuit, an exercise completed to get a job, get tenure and advance an academic career. At times, research topics can appear so disconnected from our world and its urgent crises that it’s hard to understand its contribution. And if the purpose of historical research isn’t immediately clear and practical, politicians and university administrators claim there is no value in providing a place for it.

Last summer, the University of West Virginia cut dozens of programs in the humanities and fired 143 faculty.

Facing budgetary pressure and dwindling state funding, higher education seems increasingly uninterested in fighting for the greater good. Such purpose is sacrificed for more short-sighted pursuits that appear to justify the exorbitant cost of college. At the university where I teach, students can major in finance, accountancy, and even real estate. But institutional support for humanities majors and research is dwindling. It’s easy to lose sight of the necessity of studying the past when universities increasingly equate value with monetary profit. Holding on to my passion for research began to feel like riding out a storm in a rickety skiff. Every working day seemed like a fight for what my colleagues and I do to be seen and valued.

But the transformation of higher education isn’t the only thing that has made me question what is possible under the rules of research laid out by profit-driven universities. I had written my dissertation and published extensively on German photography in the 1920s, but I was beginning to feel boxed in. All good researchers, I believed, studied the same topic for their entire career. The sustained journey down the rabbit hole to uncover every detail about a narrow topic was what made someone a credible expert. But what if I wanted to study something different?

What I really wanted to talk about was my daughter and the IQ tests she was required to take in school.  My daughter has Down syndrome, and she was given her first IQ test before she started kindergarten. The school psychologist told me that the test was required for her Individualized Education Plan, or IEP, a legal document that defines the specific needs, goals, and accommodations to help her keep up with her peers.

I was vaguely familiar with the connection of IQ tests to the eugenics craze of the early twentieth century. Wasn’t it strange that these tests were still used? The colleagues I told about my daughter’s evaluation were surprised to hear that IQ testing was playing a role in my life. Their faces performed the same series of reactions: brief recognition, mild bemusement, and then troubled confusion. I loved talking about my daughter, but I also loved watching the awkwardness that would arise when I did. There was an unspoken rule that research and a scholar’s personal life were supposed to be kept separate. But I realized that I wanted to breach the boundary between these two parts of my life.

I began doing research on IQ tests, their current value and use in the field of psychology as well as their history. I was constantly aware that I was approaching this research as a nonexpert, an art historian who had a limited understanding of statistics and standard deviations. But I was also aware that what I was researching was meaningful to me in a way I had never experienced before. I was uncovering an explanation for the way IQ tests will shape my daughter’s life. But along the way I discovered that the tests impact all of us. They established the ways we still understand and value intelligence, who is and is not given opportunities to be successful, and who gets to have access to the best education possible. I was met with roadblocks and curious stares from psychologists who thought I was asking more questions than a parent should. But I realized that it wasn’t true that research should be left to the experts. In fact, research was feeling more like a human right.

I drove one late summer morning from Ohio’s rural southwest to its industrial northeast to visit the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. Although the subject still seemed new and foreign, the environment was familiar. After I checked in for my appointment, I sat at one of the twenty large desks aligned in a rank-and-file grid. The archivist wheeled out several boxes of files I had ordered and parked it near my desk.

I made the trip to Akron to study the papers of Henry Goddard, the psychologist who transformed the IQ test into a systematic method of social classification. I had already read many of Goddard’s published papers before making the drive, but I wanted to see the archive for myself. I hoped that looking at his drafts, his private papers, his letters, might give me a better understanding of how Goddard’s research still informs my daughter’s future, and how different it can be from the lives of the children who Goddard studied.

After giving IQ tests to thousands of children, Goddard proposed that “idiot” would be used to describe those who demonstrated intelligence no higher than a two-year-old. Those who had intelligence from three to seven years would be “imbeciles.” For a third grouping, those with a mental age from eight to twelve, Goddard proposed a new term, “moron.” “Our public school systems are full of them,” Goddard wrote, “and yet Superintendents and Boards of Education are struggling to make normal people out of them.” The IQ test could identify these students and place them in institutions, where Goddard thought they belonged. His recommendations, based on an IQ score, set the stage for institutions and segregated special needs classrooms for most of the twentieth century.

I paged through cold, clinical records of children that Goddard studied at the Training School, an institution in Vineland, New Jersey. I studied photographs of children in well-kept dresses and neatly pressed suits lined up on benches. These children rose up as ghosts in my mind. I thought about how they might have lived as apparitions for their families too. They still existed yet were kept away, out of sight and without a chance to really live, grow, and learn. As I looked at these ghosts, I thought about my daughter and felt both grateful to not be living in this ugly era of history and threatened by its lingering effects in the present.

My daughter learns in a classroom among her peers. I have never felt like her right to an education has been threatened. And still, my research showed me that the history of the IQ test informs our world in so many urgent ways. Goddard’s bigotry seemed alarmingly familiar to me. I had read terms like “mental age,” a way of explaining my daughter’s cognitive development by comparing her to a younger child, on her medical reports since she was a toddler. I had suffered through countless graphs and charts telling me that my daughter had a limited mastery of material on a standardized test while completely disregarding her many strengths. I had witnessed ways in which the desperate efforts of kids who struggle to communicate are misunderstood as deviance and bad behavior. The IQ test lingers today as a simplified measure of human value, an opportunity to invoke the playground insults of “moron,” and “idiot” that the test’s quest to quantify and categorize generated. It has provided our world with a statistical justification to value intelligence over morals, productivity over empathy.

The present isn’t the same as the past, but it doesn’t mean that history should be forgotten. Doing historical research requires a complex reckoning. To reckon means to consider, but also to settle accounts. It means deciding what we can and cannot control about how the past appears in the present, and how we can do better in the future. Research showed me that the normalized practice of excluding people with intellectual disabilities–from education, from work, from civic life–has a history that was determined by the flawed logic and decisions of people like Goddard. It also taught me that it doesn’t have to be this way.

I don’t think all research has to be personal to be meaningful. But research is a powerful form of self-awareness that is vital to democracy. Historical research reveals how our world is shaped by human actions. Some are small, some are large. Some are righteous and some are horrifically flawed. But all those actions could have been different–their meaning and outcome no less natural than any other. This has a profound impact on the way we view our present conditions. Why do we assume that people with intellectual disabilities can’t learn among their peers? Why do we assume that IQ tests provide meaningful information about a person’s future potential? Because of Goddard and other eugenicists who used the IQ test to segregate those who they did not consider normal. Because their logic is still with us today. But it doesn’t have to be. Research empowers citizens to explain their own circumstances and question what others say is normal or natural. All humans–including the future accountants and real estate agents who I teach–should have the right to know how their world got made. The future can’t escape the influence of the past, but research helps us imagine a better world.

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A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother’s Reckoning with the IQ Test by Pepper Stetler is available from Diversion Books.