Eugenics and IQ

My classroom window. The old Royal Vale Elementary.

I once interviewed a person involved with a School Garden initiative and he informed me that schools were built on the same principals as prisons, for optimum containment and visibility. So the kids aren’t crazy, after all!

The news lately is that there will soon be a definitive test for Alzheimer’s. I am not that keen as my father died of this disease and I know there is an hereditary component.

Besides, I can no longer remember much.

McGill University is responsible for this test which measures the amount of a certain hormone in the blood.

I wonder how this test can be exploited…. cause it will be. And perhaps misused and even abused.

Yesterday, I posted a bit about the IQ test, the Stanford Binet test, as it was invented in 1912, the year Flora Nicholson got her teaching degree.

I have long assumed the test was more about keeping people in their place than about creating a level playing field, just because ‘keeping people in their place’ was the mantra of the era. Not mantra, it was the sort-of hidden agenda.

Sure enough, it seems that the person who brought the Binet test to America (this in 1908) was a proponent of Eugenics. HH Goddard, who wanted to use the test to prove that the white race was superior, in a time of rampant immigration.

Alfred Binet, the French psychologist, who died in 1911, did not create the test for these purposes, quite the opposite.

So as history repeats itself, a reason to be worried about this test, for a disease with no cure.

My source: A. Plucker, J. A. (Ed.). (2003). Human intelligence: Historical influences, current controversies, teaching resources. Retrieved [insert month day, year], from http://www.indiana.edu/~intell

PS. My twin brother had the highest or one of the highest IQ’s in the school, above, so my mom was told at parent/teacher interviews. But he was also aspergers, bi-polar and schitzo, later on any way. So what would the eugenicists made of that?

The Mismeasure of Me

My report card in 1967.

In the tenth grade I got such a low mark in math that I went from being in the advanced class to the ‘slow’ class, whatever it was called.

This was a weird experience, because in my school, in the entire Board, students were streamed. I had spent 4 grades travelling from class to class with the same group of talented students.

So I hardly knew the kids in my ‘new’ grade 11 math class. But, being an insightful kind of girl, I instantly realized that these kids were treated as if they were stupid. (I remember the teacher, the oldest teacher in the school, a Mr. Monk, coming into the classroom with a styrofoam cup on his nose, oinking like a pig.) And if felt awful.

In my other classes, the teachers assumed we were very smart and treated us as such, to such an extent that we got away with a lot. I recall in one English class the one very very smart kid handing it all his assignments for the year on the last day of school. He got a big laugh from the other students, because he did so with panache, tossing this assignments one by one on the teacher’s desk. He wasn’t alone that day, in handing in overdue asssignments either.

The fact is, with respect to my problem, the people around me, teachers and my parents, should have questioned why I failed math, but it was kind of expected of girls in those days to ‘hit the wall’ so to speak. (A friend of mine also did hit the wall, but her Dad tutored her and she went on to become a top math student at university and to work in high finance. )

In my case, it had more to do with my parents getting a divorce that year – and the fact the teacher in the advanced math class did not appear to respect girls’ talents. (My father had a degree in MATH from Oxford, actually!)

Anyway, that’s all long evaporated water under the far away bridge. (But I might say, that when I took those student aptitude tests for university, (they were not called SATS) I got a 75 percentile in math, which was tied with a friend of mine who went on to become a top top TOP scientist and a lot lot better than my best friend, who got 99 percentile in English (I got 95 or so) and about a 4 percentile in math. She went on a to a brilliant career in the arts. (Something, sadly, I did not do.) So it goes to show you.

What has this got to do with Flo in the City? Well, 1912 was the year the Stanford-Binet test or IQ test was created (I’ve read) and the year Flora graduated from Macdonald Teachers’ College.

I have her student portfolio and one of notebooks contains a page on teaching ‘defectives’ to read. That’s how they referred to retarded, special or challenged children back them. (There’s nothing in the portfolio about IQ tests (too soon) but there is a mention of “the new phonics system” and well as Tonic Solfa (?).

In 1912, the eugenics movement was in full swing and I suspect that the Stanford Binet test (or Binet-Simons?)was created in some way to divide defectives from normals. (I have yet to find early articles about the test.)

They needed a measure. (I must re-read the Mismeasure of Man.)

By 1921, the year my Mom was born, the test already was popular in schools. One article I found in the New York Times claims that The Stanford Binet test is used in many schools as a basis for classification.

This particular article is a ‘soft science’ one that says that the higher the social status the higher the IQ. It seems some pesky people were using the test to prove that grocers’ sons were smarter than professors’ sons and this irked the establishment.

This kind of talk was turning the purpose of the test on its head!!

Average kids, says the article, test between 95 and 105, while the children of the upper classes and higher mercantile classes test between 110 and 120.

This, they say, proves the higher social ranks contain smarter people.

(Of course, it proves the test is designed to make the people from the higher social ranks seem smarter.)

Anyway, other articles I’ve pulled out from the early 1930′s, when the eugenics movement is still going strong, although it will suddenly drop into disfavor because of Hitler and his embrace of the doctrine, reveal that the test was used to decide if young offenders, murderers and such, were mature enough to stand trial as adults.

Now, in 1921, it appears, they came out with “The Condensed Guide for the Stanford Revision of the Binet Simon Tests.”

It appears that educators were ‘too dumb’ or ‘too lazy’ or ‘too busy’ to fully ingest the longer guide for giving these newfangled IQ tests to their students and they needed something more condensed.

The author writes in the preface : “Since the appearance of the Stanford Revision of the Binet Simon Intelligence Scale I, I have frequently been urged to prepare a condensed guide to make the application of the tests easier and more convenient.”
(SIC SIC SIC)

Well, this book is available on Archive.org and I certainly don’t have the time to deconstruct the questions. (I’m afraid I will not be able to do any of the puzzles and feel dumb. And, I just learned they have a test coming soon for Alzheimer’s and that is giving me great anxiety, which lowers my IQ. I am wondering if this test is a good or terrible thing. I mean, how might this test be used and abused on Old Folk? Will husbands leave wives or vice versa when they discover the awful truth early? Will people be fired from their jobs or kicked off their insurance?)

I am a writer, a literate person, so I looked to the final test at the back of this condensed guide, which was a vocabulary test, just like the Word Power at the back of the Old Reader’s Digests. (My mom aced these Word Powers, I recall, and took great pride in doing so as she was French Canadian. But she could not do basic fractions in the kitchen, which she needed to double the recipes for the meals and desserts she made for us. I did any and all calculations for her, while never really picking up an culinary skills as she didn’t have the patience to teach me.)

There are two lists of words in this condensed guide to Binet-Simon IQ test. Here are some chosen sort of randomly: gown, juggler, mosaic, bewail, hysterics, disproportionate, milksop, ambergris, ochre, sudorific, harpy, parterre, complot, perfunctory, piscatorial; guitar, shrewd, repose, dilapidated, drabble, irony, sapient, humunculous.

Get my drift. (Quick. Define drift.)

I dare you to write a sentence containing these words.

Hmm. I have to wonder how Flora’s immigrant students, ‘defective’ or not, most of whom had parents who spoke no English, fared on this IQ test.

Exposing the Dark Underbelly of History

Emma LaJeunesse, Opera Star, known as Madame Albani.

I happen to have a paper theatre bill on hand for a performance of Madame Albani, unknown year. It is from the Nicholson Collection. Maybe one of the Nicholson women attended…Well, very likely. They attended operas in Richmond, so their letters reveal.

Madame Albani wasn’t Italian, she was a French Canadian from Chambly, (last epoque’s Celine Dion) who made it big and was performing at Covent Garden in the late 1800′s.

The Nicholson girls liked fine things, and I assume Italian Opera, was one of these fine things.

Italian lace too. Italian cheese, too. And in 1910, Edith mentions in a letter that she went to see Creatore and his Italian band, where she met Marion. That would be Giuseppe Creatore, an Italian American bandleader who was devoted to Italian opera.

This morning, as I continued researching background to Flo in the City, my book about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era in Montreal, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ I decided to enter the term “Italian” into Google News Archives, to see what came up for the Montreal Gazette.

I wanted to find out what feelings and images and ideas the word “Italian” evoked in the Nicholson girls in 1910.

(You see, a few blogs back I wrote about how the Immigration Policy of 1911 deliberately tried to dissuade Italians form immigrating to Canada . Despite this, they came, about 60,000 in the 1900-1910 and the same amount for 1910-1920. And they came to Montreal, mostly.)

The articles I read from 1908-1913, revealed a world of gangs (there was a sweep of an immigrant neighbourhood in 1908, where police randomly searched young Italian men for razors, knives and guns) and hard, life-threatening work. (Italian men, it seemed, worked at manual labour in dangerous jobs, where they sometimes (often) were injured or died. And if they went on strike or protested, they were fired en masse. Once 100 men were fired for protesting money being deducted off the paycheques, ostensibly medical charges.)

There were a lot of murders associated with Italians reported in the paper, usually gang or work related, but sometimes crimes of passion. And at least one Italian woman ( a recent arrival of 26 who worked first in a restaurant and then as a domestic) killed herself because her boyfriend’s wife came over from Italy to join him.

Dr. Louis Laberge of the Montreal Health Department (who I have written about extensively) explained that this Italian (and Chinese) crime wave was cause by the stresses of tenement living. The Italians were living “Oriental style” with too many people crammed into one house. He wanted forced inspections.

So, Italians in Montreal had it hard, it seems. But still they came and became an integral part of our city.

And, then, once again I was led to a dark period in history (one that has been erased from the books). I found an interview with Maria Montessori, which led me to look up more on the “eugenics” movement.

Remember, the Italians who came here to start a new life, weren’t the “elite.” Immigrants never are. (The Nicholsons were descendants of the lowest of the low, Isle of Lewis Scots, cleared from the land.)

The Eugenics Movement, to put it crudely, was about eliminating inferior beings, mental defectives, criminals and even those swarthy Southern types. (No kidding.)

Some people say the inherent weaknesses in this position. One writer asks, “Would Shakespeare’s illiterate parents have been permitted to procreate? And another person has an interesting take: “As long as men are attracted by beauty and women by strength, we need no eugenics movement.” It’s true, even in today’s techno-age, the ideal couple isn’t Bill and Melinda Gates. It’s alway a super jock married to a super model.)

But many people, many people of social stature including one US President, thought the idea of sterilizing the inferior and testing would be couples was a great idea.

I suspect that the eugenics movement got moving because of the ‘scary’ wave of immigration to North America.

Anyway, here’s a link to a 2003 book that tries to bring this story into the light.

I find it suspicious that the Stanford Binet test (IQ TEST) was invented in 1912, at the height of the eugenics craze. So does the author of this book.

http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/w/war-against-the-weak.shtml

The idea of IQ is sacred today. (Just the other day a news report said that manganese in Quebec water may be lowering children’s IQ by six points. Oh my!)

But maybe IQ is a load of BS designed to promote the interests of one group over another. Maybe we’ve all been had…Of course, we’ll never know, as it is the people with high IQ’s who run the world by virtue of having done well in the school system, with the exception of very rich men who are given a pass… HMMMM.

An Embarrassing Bit of History -Eugenics Movement

As I peruse more Montreal Gazette archive articles while researching Flo in the City, my novel about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era in Canada, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ I am forced to revisit a sketchy topic I touched upon on my website: Eugenics.

Carrie Derick (or Derrick) Canada’s first female full-time professor, a botanist, and a President of the Montreal Council of Women 1909-1912 and founder of the militant Suffrage Movement was, at least at one time, a proponent of ‘unnatural’ selection as promoted by the Eugenics Movement.

So, apparently, was Emily Murphy, a famous Canadian suffragist.

Now, how could a person who supported suffrage, in large part because women were seen as better suited to tackle the grave social problems of the city, support sterlizing the feeble-minded and the weak? I mean, that was the argument made by men to keep women down, that women were naturally feeble-minded and gentle-hearted and spiritually fine.

Before we judge, however, we must keep in mind that eugenics was a trendy belief among the educated in 1910. Theodore Roosevelt was a proponent as was Tommy Douglas, our Greatest Canadian, as well as Alexander Graham Bell, whose wife was deaf. So imagine!

In Derick’s case, well, in 1909 she presided over a lecture by a gentleman, a Professor Witmore, who was endeavoring to improve the lot of the feeble-minded (I’m just using their term)by understanding them and taking care of them, thereby promoting the “useful citizenship of the imbecile.”

Then in 1913, Derick gives a lecture in favour of sterilizing such people. Her argument seems ludicrous, it almost makes you laugh. She’s supposedly lecturing on genetics and the nature/nurture debate, something of interest to all who are concerned with ‘the improvement of the human race.” She gives two real life examples to illustrate her point: A man named Jukes, ‘a lazy drunken wastrel’ who is the first in a line of thousands of such degenerates. Then she names another man, who is respectable, hardworking and god-fearing, I presume, who begets a huge line of superior “clergymen, physicians, college professors (sic) distinguished army and navy officers and good, pure women (sic again).(No poets, though

And, then, the political side of this eugenics issue rears its ugly and predictable head: “In the shipbuilding of Canada, unguarded immigration isone of the greatest dangers. Not only should the health and character of immigrants be known, but the record should also embrace his or her parents and grandparents and should a taint of degeneracy be disclosed, rejection should follow. Remember, Canada was experiencing a huge increase in immigration.

Well, I guess I’m not going to get to be alive: my Yorkshire ancestors were sheep-stealers. My French Canadian ancestors were Filles du Roy (prostitutes and otherwise imprisoned women sent to the New World as breeding stock.)And the Nicholsons, well, they are descended from Norseman, the mother of all pillagers and rapists.

(Which brings to mind something my son likes to say: A low class sociopath ends up in prison. A high class one ends up a CEO of a large corporation or working for Wall Street)…but I digress.

Well, this part of our history has been glossed over, largely because eugenics got associated with the Nazis. But one aspect is still with us and is highly respected. The IQ test. The IQ test was created in 1912, (as a tool of the eugenics movement?…Something to replace the science of phrenology?) Even back then, they tried to give these tests to immigrants, who didn’t even know English. So I guess they failed and were deemed imbeciles.

One of the odd things Derick says is that ‘alcoholism doesn’t cause degeneracy, it’s the other way around, degeneracy causes alcoholism.’ And although that sounds ridiculous, today alcoholism is considered a disease by some and there is a proven? genetic factor underlying addiction. (Or is there?)

And just yesterday, the news media was abuzz with the story that a spinal fluid test can prove conclusively if a person is going to get Alzheimer’s. As a fifty five year old who can’t remember anything and whose father died of Alzheimer’s I was a little freaked out to hear this. But I was especially concerned with the GIVEN that Alzheimer’s Disease was genetic. I mean heavy metals and other environmental issues must be behind the rise in Alzheimer’s disease. Or the numbers would be stable.

And my first thought was, yea, find out early and your husband leaves you and you get fired or at least not given tenure,(well no one gets tenure anymore) or your insurance stops covering you… EWWWW.

This genetic testing (for any disease) whatever the rationale, smacks of the eugenics movement.

And if the eugenics movement proves anything, it’s that otherwise intelligent, thoughtful, good people, can be terribly WRONG about certain things.