Regarding the "academic legend" claim, I'd be interested in hearing what,
if any, opinion other TIPSfolk have on the historical account of the Ellis
Island testing run by H.H. Goddard, laid out in Leon Kamin's, "The Science
and Politics of IQ" - a book my major professor had me read for my written
qualifying exams (ah, memories...). Also, in Stephen Jay Gould's, "The
Mismeasure of Man" he includes a "bar chart" that supposedly came from
Goddard's work, with the bars roughly depicting the percent of "normal",
"feeble-minded", and "moronic" individuals sampled from a variety of
countries. Are these books full of "academic legends", too?
Johnna
P.S. In order to relate this to teaching - I have used Kamin's and Gould's
history lessons for years in talking about the uniquely American reaction
to Benet's intelligence test (Benet tended to see intelligence as subject
to change; Americans tended to see it as biologically determine AND fixed.)
At 9:41 AM -0800 3/29/99, Jeffrey Nagelbush wrote:
>It was suggested on tips that the idea that different cultural groups
>(immigrants) in the US had differing levels of intelligence based IQ
>tests was never a popular idea but was an "academic legend." I hope I
>said this right (if in a horribly long sentence). I accidently deleted
>the message.
>
>In any case I offer the following as evidence against the legend
>interpretation:
>
>The Nordics are... rulers, organizers, and aristocrats... The Alpine
>race is always and everywhere a race of peasants... The Alpine is the
>perfect slave, the ideal serf... the unstable temperament and the lack
>of coordination and reasoning power so often found among the Irish...
>our army sample of immigrants from Russia is at least one half Jewish...
>Our figures, then, would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that
>the Jew is intelligent... We must face a possibility of racial
>admixture here that is infinitely worse than that faced by any European
>country today, for we are incorporating the negro into our racial stock
>... The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the
>decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the
>presence here of the negro.
> -Assistant Professor Carl Brigham of Princeton University in A Study
>of American Intelligence.
>
>The thesis is carefully worked up to by a logical and careful analysis
>of the results of the army tests... we shall certainly be in hearty
>agreement with him when he demands a more selective policy for future
>immigration and a more vigorous method of dealing with the defective
>strains already in this country.
> -1923 Journal of Educational Psychology's review of Brigham's
>landmark book
>
>The following is a web site that has the graph that Brigham used to
>support his ideas that different immigrants had differing levels of
>intelligence:
>http://www.wisc.edu/history/404tja/graph.html
jk shapiro "Don't worry about it, ok?
(GWing wannabe We're good at fighting losing battles,
and die-hard Duo fan) remember?"
- Duo Maxwell, Shinigami pilot
