Word: iq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...country embraced the IQ--and the application of IQ testing to restructure society--more thoroughly than the U.S. Every year millions of Americans have their IQ measured, many with a direct descendant of Binet's original test, the Stanford-Binet, although not necessarily for the purpose Binet intended. He developed his test as a way of identifying public school students who needed extra help in learning, and that is still one of its leading uses...
...broader and more controversial use of IQ testing has its roots in a theory of intelligence--part science, part sociology--that developed in the late 19th century, before Binet's work and entirely separate from it. Championed first by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, it held that intelligence was the most valuable human attribute, and that if people who had a lot of it could be identified and put in leadership positions, all of society would benefit...
Terman believed IQ tests should be used to conduct a great sorting out of the population, so that young people would be assigned on the basis of their scores to particular levels in the school system, which would lead to corresponding socioeconomic destinations in adult life. The beginning of the IQ-testing movement overlapped with the eugenics movement--hugely popular in America and Europe among the "better sort" before Hitler gave it a bad name--which held that intelligence was mostly inherited and that people deficient in it should be discouraged from reproducing. The state sterilization that Justice Oliver Wendell...
...American IQ promoters scored a great coup during World War I when they persuaded the Army to give IQ tests to 1.7 million inductees. It was the world's first mass administration of an intelligence test, and many of the standardized tests in use today can be traced back to it: the now ubiquitous and obsessed-over SAT; the Wechsler, taken by several million people a year, according to its publisher; and Terman's own National Intelligence Test, originally used in tracking elementary school children. All these tests took from the Army the basic technique of measuring intelligence mainly...
...British sociologist named Michael Young coined the word "meritocracy" to denote a society that organizes itself according to IQ-test scores. That term too has entered the language, though it doesn't have quite the market penetration that IQ does--or the disparaging overtone that Young intended in his satiric fable The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033. Terman and many other early advocates of IQ testing had in mind the creation of an American meritocracy, though the word didn't exist then. They believed IQ tests could be the means to create, for the first time ever, a society...