Excerpt from The Achievement of Subnormal Children in Standarized Educational Tests

The first public school classes instituted for mentally subnormal children were intended for the feeble-minded. The first class was established in the public schools of the city of Halle, Germany, in 1859. The development of these classes was at first very slow.* Austria did not establish any public day classes until 1885 (in Vienna), England until 1892 (in Leicester and London), the United States until 1896 (in Providence), France until 1909 (in Paris), and Canada until 1910 (in Toronto).

Usually at first the pupils were assigned to these classes on the recommendation of the school medical inspectors, the principals and the teachers, without any special examination to determine whether the child's pedagogical retardation was due to mental deficiency or to any one of a number of other causes, such as lack of interest or application, late entrance in school, frequent absences or transfers, physical defects or illness, specific mental or pedagogical defects, defects in the course of study itself, incompetency on the part of the teacher, lack of en rapport between the pupil and the teacher, ey. The determination of the relative influence of the various factors which conceivably were causally related to the child's pedagogical incompetency was left to the common sense appraisal of the teaching and medical staffs of the schools. Where the final selection was entrusted to the school physician, it is probable that his judgment was primarily based on the teachers' reports and only secondarily on the results of the physical examination and the sketchy mental examination which the examiner could give by means of a few common-sense questions.

The unsatisfactory nature of this common sense method of selecting the pupils who should be assigned to the classes for mental defectives, gradually became recog nized and led Binet, the brilliant French psychologist and child study expert, to develop a scale of intelligence by means of which it would be possible for the trained exam iner to determine approximately by a series of simple, uniform and objective tests the child's general level of intelligence, or his degree of intelligence retardation. Binet recognized that the very essence of feeble-mindedness was intelligence deficiency, and that no child could be considered feeble-minded and subject for assignment to a special school unless he were genuinely deficient in intelligence by a certain amount (not definitely specified by Binet) no matter how little he knew or how unstable he might be in his emotional or motor reactions. This scale, which was first offered by Binet and Simon in 1905 and revised by them in 1908 and 1911 and which has passed through a number of other revisions in this country and elsewhere, speedily won almost universal recognition, and fairly revolutionized the method of selecting pupils for the special classes for mental defectives, and greatly stimulated the develop ment of these classes. In fact, it practically superseded all other methods of selection} because of the recognized superiority of a uniform, objective scale, no matter what its defects might be, as compared with the subjective judgment of the individual exami ners. The popularity of this scale is largely responsible for the development and extension of group intelligence testing, which has reached its highest development in the army tests, and also for the present-day popularity of mental testing in general.

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