Opposition to the use of I.Q. testing goes back as far as testing itself. Its practitioners have been accused of, among other things, misusing science to justify capitalist exploitation; allowing their obsession with classification to blind them to the huge variety of human abilities; encouraging soulless teaching; and, worst of all, inflaming racial prejudices and justifying racial inequalities. To this school of thinking, The Bell Curve was a godsend. Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein succeeded more effectively than even Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin in linking I.Q. testing firmly in people’s minds with spectacularly unpopular arguments: that different racial groups have different I.Q. averages; that America is calcifying into rigid and impermeable castes; that the promise of American life is an illusion. The more society realizes the dream of equal opportunities, the more it breaks down into incommensurate groups, segregated not just by the accident of the environment, but by the unforgiving logic of genes.



But there is another, more enlightened tradition in the history of I.Q. testing, a tradition that was once the darling of liberals. It linked I.Q. testing with upward mobility, child-centered education, more generous treatment of the handicapped, humane welfare reform and, above all, the creation of a meritocracy. Indeed, it could be argued that it is this enlightened tradition that reflects the real essence of I.Q. testing, uncontaminated by local prejudices and unscientific conjectures. In ignoring this, in demonizing the purveyors of I.Q., liberals have betrayed their own political and moral tradition.

This liberal incarnation of I.Q. testing can be seen at its most articulate and influential in England, where its exponents held sway over educational policymaking from the 1930s until the early 1960s. These I.Q. testers found their political inspiration in the meritocratic ideal, a revolt against patronage and particularism and a plea for individual justice. During the course of their attempts to wrest control of the civil service from the landed aristocracy in the mid-nineteenth century, Whig reformers such as Lord Macaulay, a historian, and Charles Trevelyan, a mandarin, argued that positions should be allocated on the basis of examination results and that the exams should be designed to test “the candidate’s powers of mind” rather than to “ascertain the extent of his metaphysical reading.”

By the twentieth century, the left took up this mission. During its early years, the Labour Party saw its main role as constructing a ladder of merit, stretching from the slums to Oxbridge and regulated by objective examinations, so that the able could find their natural level. Sidney and Beatrice Webb wanted to turn Britain’s educational system into a gigantic “capacity-catching machine,” capable of “rescuing talented poverty from the shop or the plough” and channeling it into the national elite. H.G. Wells argued that “the prime essential in a progressive civilization was the establishment of a more effective selective process for the privilege of higher education.” R.H. Tawney, the doyen of socialist educationalists, welcomed I.Q. tests for pointing to the huge number of talented working-class children who were overlooked in the existing system.

The psychometrists argued that I.Q. tests were powerful instruments of meritocratic reform. I.Q. tests were particularly useful in spotting promising working-class children held back in school by poverty in the home, and in providing them with a secure ladder up the social system. Far from being defenders of the status quo, the psychometrists believed in the inevitability of social mobility. The random element in Mendelian inheritance combined with regression to the mean ensured that children would differ in significant ways from their parents. The psychologist Cyril Burt calculated that, in order to ensure that people were doing the sort of jobs for which their abilities marked them out, almost one-quarter of their children would have to end up in different social classes from their parents. The really conservative theory of abilities is not hereditarianism, after all, but environmentalism: if parents can transmit all their advantages to their children, educational as well as material, then social mobility will always be something of a freak.