Piercing intelligence

Pepper Stetler, an associate professor of art history and a “lifelong overachiever,” never thought much about IQ tests until her daughter Louisa took one, pre-kindergarten. Weeks later Ms. Stetler and her husband met with a team of administrators and teachers to discuss Louisa’s Individualized Education Plan, a document defining specific recommendations for children with special needs. Stetler’s apprehension grew as the conversation veered to Louisa’s IQ score—lower than average, but high for a child with Down syndrome. Stetler imagined a dot on a bell curve: “a suspiciously tidy way to mark Louisa’s potential.”

A Measure of Intelligence (Diversion Books) charts Stetler’s deep dive into the history, growth, and rationale of IQ testing, beginning in France with Alfred Binet (whose test was later revised by psychologist Lewis Terman into the Stanford-Binet). Her conclusions cast doubt on all quantitative assessments, including military service exams, the SAT, and the Cognitive Aptitude Test. Rather than an accurate measure of ability, she contends, they classify people according to mental age, with predetermined ideas about what to expect from each group. They solidify a certain perception of what intelligence is: the ability to function in a competitive (capitalist) society.

The dubious, often racist, roots of testing include some jaw-dropping details. Henry Goddard, a villain in this story, was one of the first to ­create an IQ test to determine ability. As head of an institution for “feeble-­minded” adults, Goddard used an artificial scale to sort the intellectually challenged into “idiots” (with a supposed mental age of 2), “imbeciles” (3-7), and “morons” (8-12). He saw the latter group as benefiting the most from testing, as they could be pulled out of society and placed in institutions. Versions of his scale are still in use today.

The hero of A Measure of Intelligence is Stetler’s daughter Louisa, an expressive, exuberant spirit with a compassionate heart. Stetler’s deep love and appreciation for her one-of-a-kind daughter is genuinely touching. Her passionate plea for an approach to education that values people of all abilities is convincing and heartfelt.

But one pertinent issue she never addresses: How many Down syndrome babies, with all their potential, are destroyed by abortion? She may have deemed it outside the focus of this book, or outside her progressive inclinations, but unless we value their lives first, we’ll never value their education.