When asked why, they tend to respond, “he changed the way we think about the world” or “he came up with something entirely new”.Įinstein’s work on relativity in the early 1900s certainly challenged traditional thinking and revolutionised our understanding of space and time, but were such radical ideas caused by a high IQ alone? ![]() When I ask people to name a genius, most say Albert Einstein, the German-born physicist. These analyses were then referenced during the creation of the 1924 Immigration Act, which limited the numbers of outsiders allowed to enter the US. More disconcertingly, they combined to build a massive dataset, which was used to demonstrate the supposed intellectual superiority of some racial groups over others. Their individual results influenced the rank each was given. In an era when class divides were just beginning to disappear, this quantification of intelligence offered an alternative, seemingly scientific, way to classify large groups of people.ĭuring the First World War, paper-based IQ tests were given to 1.75 million US military recruits. Other psychologists divided Binet’s mental age by the child’s actual age and scaled the result up by 100 to produce an ‘intelligence quotient’, or IQ. It was these children who became potential candidates for special education programmes. ![]() Children unable to complete tasks appropriate for their age group were considered to have a lower mental age. French psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon intended that children would be led through a series of short tasks relating to everyday problems during individual interviews.īinet felt intelligence was too complex to be quantified by a single number, but he later introduced the concept of ‘mental age’. The earliest practical intelligence tests, published in 1905, were developed to help spot young Parisians with what we’d now call special educational needs. Created with admirable aims, they were later used to sort and rank masses of people and to give credence to theories of racial difference. Such tests are direct descendants of tools designed to evaluate children’s mental abilities over a hundred years ago. Today, proud parents on ‘Child Genius’ cite the results of IQ tests as evidence of their children’s innate talents. ![]() In the 18th and 19th centuries, physiognomists and phrenologists identified facial features and head shapes consistent with intellectual and creative genius – from sharp-cornered eyes to lumps around the temples. Genius may be indefinable, but people have still spent centuries measuring whatever they think it is.
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