The modern intelligence-testing tradition did not begin as a competition among adults trying to one-up each other with a higher IQ score. Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon developed their 1905 intelligence scale around an educational problem involving children, particularly the need to determine the intellectual level of children who were struggling and identify those who might require additional attention. Modern day comparison is the children who are in ESE classes who struggle to learn, based on mostly cognitive or health related conditions. Binet did describe the scale as a practical classification or hierarchy among different levels of intelligence, but the purpose was diagnostic, to understand a child’s present intellectual condition rather than turn the result into a permanent statement of human worth.
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He was also deeply skeptical of treating intelligence as fixed, later attacking the belief that an individual’s intellectual level could never be increased and calling that position “brutal pessimism.” He pursued what he called mental orthopedics, exercises intended to strengthen attention and other cognitive capacities, because the point was not simply to classify a child and walk away, but to understand the child well enough to do something useful.
[I]t is not science that ever signed off on an IQ score as the final truth of human cognitive ability.
What happened afterward changed the role of intelligence testing considerably. The Binet-Simon scale was revised and extended in the United States by Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman. Producing the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale in 1916 and intelligence testing soon expanded far beyond the individual examination of schoolchildren. During World War I, Terman, Robert Yerkes and others helped develop the Army Alpha and Beta tests, which were administered to large numbers of military recruits and helped establish mass cognitive testing as a tool of classification. Terman was also a prominent hereditarian and supporter of eugenics, which matters because it shows how far the philosophy surrounding intelligence testing had moved from Binet’s educational concern with identifying children who might need help.
More than a century later, that purpose has been increasingly inverted as IQ has become part of a broader system for sorting people socially. Putting some on top and others at the bottom, with people posting scores online to put someone else down while others parade the number around as an achievement, something to be worshiped rather than questioned. Mensa has built an international organization around admission through performance in the top 2 percent on accepted standardized intelligence tests. While there is nothing inherently wrong with measuring cognitive ability, something changed when a diagnostic and comparative tool became part of a culture of status and classification.
IQ tests provide useful information, but a cognitive test is still an instrument measuring performance under defined conditions. While these conditions can produce useful results, they filter dynamically for only a narrow slice of the brain’s actual range, like a grip test declaring itself the whole athlete. The test was meant to help children, not filter people.
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The children who most need someone to notice them are often not the children already surrounded by adults telling them how exceptional they are. They are the children described as slow, difficult, distracted, behind, or simply in need of “a little extra help,” while years pass without anyone identifying what is actually going on. Generally found in a learning disability class like ESE in Florida. Some may have genuine cognitive difficulties, some may have unusual strengths hidden behind weaknesses, and some may be highly capable children who were never referred for testing because nobody expected them to be. The point of measurement was to help elevate these children, identify where they need help, and see who needs an extra hand. Not sort people.
Modern research gives us a strong reason to take that problem seriously. A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined a large urban school district that moved away from teacher and parent referrals and began universally screening second-grade students for gifted education. Universal screening produced large increases in the representation of economically disadvantaged, Black and Hispanic students, showing qualified children had been missed all along. The children were sitting there in plain view, but the system was never looking for them.
Children lost, children forgotten. Binet did not construct his scale so an organization could exist to champion the few and forget about those who needed help. The IQ system was never meant to judge you or anyone else, it was meant to find struggling children and help them. He was trying to understand why certain children were struggling and how educators could identify them before they were simply written off. The modern culture surrounding IQ too often does the reverse by lifting up those who already perform well under a particular metric while leaving everyone else to wonder what the number supposedly says about their potential.
Cognitive testing can be useful, and pretending otherwise would be in bad faith. The mistake is turning the tool into a hierarchy and then forgetting what the tool can actually tell us. An IQ score can contain valuable information, but it cannot contain a person, and if an organization devoted to cognitive ability wants a larger purpose, perhaps Mensa’s greatest contribution in its next 80 years should not be finding more people who qualify for Mensa but finding the children everyone else missed. To go into those schools and help the lost children. Science demands rigor and ethics at the highest level, and it is not science that ever signed off on an IQ score as the final truth of human cognitive ability. When thought becomes a gate rather than a generator, logic dies and legacy masquerades as truth.
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Michael Aaron Cody is an independent theorist published in Physics Essays, Journal of Modern Physics, European Physical Journal Plus (Springer Nature), Quillette and RealClearScience. His work spans physics and policy. Find him at https://x.com/MichaelCody
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