Testing times for all

Are you a "moron," an "imbecile" or an "idiot?" No, don't stop reading indignantly, just check your IQ score. Between 50 and 70, between 25 and 50 and below 20 respectively are these denoted formal categories. Who knows, you may be a genius, up in the numerical stratosphere. A Mensa candidate.

These possibilities, however, would have been no joke in early 1920s US and even less funny in nazi Germany. They seized on primitive intelligence testing used to justify extensive legal sterilisation of the "feeble minded" in most US states and to institute mass extermination of all kinds of "undesirables" in Europe.

If you are reading this review, your very political orientation would probably have marked you for a frighteningly low quotient from Hitler's psychologists.

Stephen Murdoch examines the history of intelligence testing with its desperate attempts to present itself as a valid scientific tool shored up by statistics, percentages and measurement, all undermined by the continued lack of any acceptable definition of intelligence.

But, before we relegate the largely disreputed IQ to history's wastepaper basket, let's remember that our present education system is imprisoned in the straightjacket of tests - SATs (Standard Attainment Tests), CATs (Cognitive Abilities Tests) and the like, all designed to satisfy the data-hungry national performance school league tables and OFSTED inspectors.

Murdoch describes how the original intelligence testing was inspired by the perceived need to protect society from "the menace of the feeble-minded."

Later, with the two world wars, mass recruitment required the weeding out of those sad human beings who were deemed to be incapable of killing or being killed efficiently.

It took time for the suspicion to creep in that "environment might matter as much or more than biology when it came to intelligence test results."

And here lies the second, perhaps even more serious flaw in the attempt to categorise people psychologically. Not only do the testers have no clear idea as to what they are testing, but all group and even individual tests necessarily ignore the emotional state of the subject being tested.

As Murdoch puts it, how can tests adequately measure the influences that "confidence, test strategy, training, ability to focus, booze consumption, desire to achieve and God knows what else" have on test results?

Although few psychologists would any longer support the concept of an innate measurable intelligence, the notion has "worked its way into the general consciousness" and "is broadly and unthinkingly accepted as a fact, even though it is untrue."

This matters hugely as it provides a powerful tool for those who would structure society in their own image. In the US, the racist agenda has been well served by dubious intelligence-testing "evidence."

Murdoch's highly readable account of a failed idea that is nevertheless still dangerously active in the present may be acutely summed up in the words of one of the more enlightened psychologists Howard Gardner. "Intelligences (note the plural) are not things that can be seen or counted ... they are potentials - presumably neutral ones - that will or will not be activated, depending upon the values of a particular culture, the opportunities available in that culture and the personal decisions made by individuals and/or their families, schoolteachers and others."