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8. The Case of the Manufactured Morons: Science and Social Policy in Two Eras, 1934-1966
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Introduction to Chapter 8 Like Zane Miller, Hamilton Cravens has explored the relationships between cultural notions and social science. As Miller examined the ideas of an important turn of the century sociologist on race, here Cravens has studied a group of child psychologists in the interwar years who took positions contrary to orthodox professional opinion on the stability of the intelligence quotient (IQ). By the early 1930s, Cravens argues, almost all child psychologists (and other psychologists as well) agreed that the IQ was fixed at birth. The mavericks Cravens writes about were faculty at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (ICWRS), perhaps the leading research center in its field in the world. Cravens insists that notions about stability or nonstability of IQ were largely grounded in the culture's more general ideas about the meaning of group identity for the individual. To what extent was one's identity with a particular group-a class, a race, a gender, or the like-fixed for all time? Or were culture and nature like a suit of clothes, to be put on and taken off virtually at will, as anthropologist Margaret Mead argued in And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942), so that the individual could transcend the limits of variation of abilities of the group to which he or she was identified and work within the presumably more generous limits ofa more advantaged group? Was it possible, in other words, to think of any and all people as free-standing, autonomous individuals and of the group identities given them by social custom and designation as arbitrary or even wrongheaded? The Iowa researchers literally stumbled onto their discoveries. Since the early 1920S the Iowa station had had a preschool, which gave faculty and graduate students access to a research population. By the early 1930S researchers had accumulated the longest series of mental and physical measure149 150 Introduction: Chapter 8 ments on youngsters aged two to six in the country, if not the world, including standard IQ tests at six-month intervals, in the fall and the spring of each school year, so as to assess the impact of the preschool on the children . The director, George D. Stoddard, and Beth Wellman, the professor in charge of managing this data, began to explore why the children seemed to gain, on average, several IQ points from fall to spring, but not from spring to fall; could an enriched school curriculum boost the supposedly inborn, fixed IQ? Wellman and her colleagues published several nursery school studies in which they suggested as much. Interestingly enough, as was the universal practice of their discipline then, they used group measurements, even though sometimes it was apparent from their language that they were referring to large IQ changes of individual children; the group variations were about five points, more or less what the statisticians and the testers said was the expected variation from test to test, thanks to such factors as the administration of the tests, familiarity with test-taking, selection, and the like. Through a lucky circumstance Stoddard arranged for his colleagues to test their ideas on an enriched curriculum for preschoolers in a state orphanage. This, he believed, would provide an ideal laboratory for the testing of his notions about how the environment (in this case the educational environment ) could influence or even permanently alter an individual's basic IQ. The ICWRS researchers concluded from their studies of children in special preschools and in orphanages that the mental development of very young children could be permanently altered by longtime exposure to environmental influences, positive or negative, by forty or more IQ points, a spectacular finding that their professional colleagues "knew" was as nonsensical as proclaiming that the earth was flat or that the species of the earth were specially created by God. In their (for the time) peculiar notions about group identity for the individual, Cravens argues, the Iowa scientists (who essentially agreed with Mead) departed in certain crucial respects from the culture's commonly understood sense of the meaning of group identity for the individual: namely, from the idea that an individual's possibilities were strictly limited by the possibilities for the group to which that individual belonged. Yet the situation was more complicated than that, showing, as Cravens argues, that the Iowa scientists were prisoners of the era in which they lived (and of its large and controlling assumptions) no less than were their contemporary critics. HAMILTON CRAVENS The Case of the Manufactured Morons: Science and Social...