ENGLISH SCHOOLS AND INTELLIGENCE TESTS.*
Tan London County Council made a step forward when it sponsored last year Mr. Cyril Burt's valuable volume, and the appearance of a new edition shows the wide interest his experiments have aroused among educationists in this country. As soon as the Binet-Simon scale of mental and scholastic tests was formulated, it became imperative to find for English children an equivalent standard wherever the weights and measures differed from those of France. Mr. Burt has supplied
the requirement. The outstanding merit of the Binet-Simon psychological scale is that a practical method is offered of calculating a child's mental age as distinct from his educational attainments, from three years upwards. A child of eight may possess through continued absence from school a mental age of twelve and an educational attainment of seven years. Moreover, it is now possible to differentiate between backward children and real defectives. The teacher, instead of blindly groping, may assume with confidence that in these tests he holds the key to a child's possibilities, apart from its actual attainments.
Mr. Burt, who is among the chief living authorities on these tests, has divided his book into three sections. In the first he deals with the practical use of the psychological scale for testing a child's intelligence ; he follows this with a discourse on the theoretical validity of the results achieved ; while in the third section he deals with the measurement of educational attainments. The whole work is the result of many years of experiment among English children. In London over 3,500 children were examined ; of these 2,674 were normal pupils in the elementary schools, 729 belonged to schools for the mentally deficient, and 107 were delinquents from remand-homes, industrial schools, and elsewhere. Practically every test was conducted by Mr. Burt himself. The results were astonishing. Apart from the discovery that a normal London child's intelligence is slightly above that of the child of similar status elsewhere, it was found that the London defective differs from a normal child rather in his lack of attainment (due possibly to ill-health, poverty, drunken parents, and so on) than in his lack of intelligence. -Of juvenile delinquents Mr. Burt writes : " I would not deny that, unrecognized and unprovided for, mental deficiency is a grave and genuine source of crime." American investigators have not hesitated to classify delinquents as feeble-minded and to point to bad economic conditions as a source of de- linquency. If sympathetic advantage of such admissions is taken by those in authority there will quickly be an end to the senseless punishments for " crimes " committed by mentally deficient children. The results obtained by the application of the Binet-Simon scale to English children should lead directly towards social reform.
Mr. Burt's intention is that his book shall be made use of by teachers. They, indeed, are the only people able at the moment to apply genuine tests, although it would be unwise to overlook that work of such psychological subtlety is impossible even for teachers unless they are trained in scien- tific method, and in psychological method especially. When errors occur they make worthless any investigation aiming at standardization. Even Mr. Burt admits that neither Binet, Simon,_ nor subsequent investigators, himself included, have made more than a beginning, and that much further experi- ment is required before the risk of error is eliminated. How grave, then, must be the danger that teachers without adequate knowledge of the Binet-Simon data may misuse the scale. The remedy lies, of course, in the better cultural equipment of the average teacher, and of parents and guardians also. Incidentally, the decision of the London County Council itself to introduce totally untrained teachers into their infant schools is brought into sharp relief. Mr. Burt's book is surely helping towards a fuller realization of how grave and compli- cated a thing is the responsibility which we owe to the child from its earliest days.
• Mental and Sehelailie Teks. By Cyril Bart, MA. With a Preface by Sir Robert Blair, LL.D. Second Edition. London: P. S. Kinn and Son. 1213. net.)
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