“As long as there are entrenched social and political distinctions between sexes, races or classes, there will be forms of science whose main function is to rationalize and legitimize these distinctions.”
ELIZABETH FEE
THE DIMINISHED CREDIBILITY OF craniology did not in any way spell an end to the attempts to “scientifically” rank human beings by group of birth. From Charles Darwin to Havelock Ellis, the theory that male animals manifested more extremes of behavior and development than did female animals was used to explain the supposed ordinariness of females versus the extraordinary range, from defectiveness to genius, of males. Other scientists hypothesized that every cell in the male and female body and brain must reflect the difference between ova (limited in number and passive) and sperm (plentiful and active). Still others measured the knowledge with which children entered school and concluded that, in the words of G. Stanley Hall, the father of modern developmental psychology, “the easy and widely diffused concepts are commonest among girls, the harder and more special or exceptional ones are commonest among boys.”37
But none of this was helpful in predicting individual variations within the sexes. In the United States, the post-slavery debate on whether education was “appropriate” for Negroes, the successes of the suffragist movement in achieving citizenship for women of all races, the constant pressure of new waves of immigrants, and most of all, the promise of meritocracy, were combining to make unprecedented demands on the educational system. Some way of making undemocratic decisions that was not based on group of birth was urgently needed.
An answer was inadvertently created in France at the turn of the century when Alfred Binet devised simple aptitude tests to identify learning disabilities in very young children, with the sole purpose of giving them remedial help. His method of testing general knowledge plus reasoning skills offered a welcome relief after the tortuous and mostly discredited path of extrapolating mental ability from physical characteristics.
By 1916, when the first Stanford-Binet Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test was published in the United States, however, Binet’s original purpose of remedial help had been left behind. The test was greeted with enthusiasm as a mass-producible yet individualized way of predicting and, contrary to Binet’s purpose, providing a rationale for excluding. Moreover, if the results didn’t turn out “right” from a group point of view, the content of the test could always be adjusted. After the first version of the Stanford-Binet IQ scale produced a small but stable margin of female superiority, for instance, the test was modified in 1937 by adding more items favoring males—mostly about sports.38
From the start, there were also race-based cultural biases in the definition of what “general knowledge” was, as well as in the interpretation of test scores. After the first mass experiment with IQ testing of army recruits in World War I, for example, results were said to demonstrate that Alpine and Mediterranean races were intellectually inferior to Nordic races, and that blacks were inferior to whites. Later, this turned out to be a bias in interpretation: regional, economic, and educational differences actually had a greater impact than race. “Nordic” soldiers from the South made the lowest scores of any white soldiers in America, and black soldiers from the North scored higher than whites from the South.39
Nonetheless, these scientifically designed, easily graded, mass-produced tests caught on like wildfire. By the end of World War I, hundreds of psychologists and educators had become skilled in administering them to soldiers, as well as to four million schoolchildren. In the 1920s, eugenicists successfully used the demonstrably false army tests to set immigration quotas that lasted through two decades, and that kept Southern and Eastern Europeans out of the U.S., most crucially when they were trying to leave in anticipation of the Holocaust. Even while Northern European quotas went unfilled before World War II, quotas based on those meaningless tests kept out as many as six million refugees. As Stephen Jay Gould comments, “The paths to destruction are indirect, but ideas can be agents as sure as guns and bombs.”40
By the 1950s, with pressure on schools increased by postwar prosperity and returning veterans, various scholastic aptitude, achievement, and intelligence tests had been integrated into every level of education.* For parents, students, and educators alike, the idea that each person had an “IQ,” an intelligence quotient that dictated her or his destiny and value, had entered the popular culture.
This system of assigning each person a number based on blind testing seemed more democratic than past biology-based categories, and indeed, it was not as airtight as they had been. Some females might do as well as most males, for instance, or some members of racial minorities might be found to have IQs higher than some whites (though as we now know, cultural bias in the test content made this difficult). It’s probably a backhanded compliment that test results no longer sufficed, and outright bans or quotas became necessary to keep Jews, blacks, women, and other “out” groups from taking places in colleges, universities, and professional schools that were assumed to be better used by white Christian males.
But there were many resemblances between these paper tests and their craniological predecessors. Both took measurements that had nothing to do with the subject’s performance in a practical situation. Both were dedicated to quantifying presumed differences, not to demonstrating that those differences were relevant, or even that they existed outside the realm of the tests themselves. Both were often formulated and interpreted in biased ways. And both generated data used to make group judgments, even when the results did not warrant them. One has only to think of the late sixties when Arthur Jensen and others were still linking IQ and scholastic-achievement scores to race to understand the level of the damage done. Though later and considerably less well publicized studies found that the education level and even religion of the mother were greater determinants of IQ than race, the purpose of supporting an existing social order had been served.
More than twenty years of criticism of such tests as biased, inaccurate, self-fulfilling in their predictions about groups as a whole yet simultaneously useless in predicting the long-term success of individuals, have begun to have some effect. In 1989, a Federal District Court ruled that the exclusive use of SAT scores to award merit scholarships (as much as $8 million annually in New York State alone) had discriminated against women.41 As a result of so much effort on the part of research and social-justice groups, reliance on test scores for college admission has diminished. Other criteria have become important parts of the mix, ranging from previous academic records, personal interviews, and autobiographical essays to the well-roundedness of the individual and the diversity of experience she or he might bring to other students at the school. In answer to the inevitable question of replacements for these inaccurate tests, there are many solutions: for instance, the so-called “portfolio method” in which students are judged on a variety of work on a particular subject over a period of time, including their own notes on why they chose a method, or what they learned from an essay or experiment.42 Nonetheless, paper tests remain the single most important element in college-admission decisions, especially for the top fifty schools, and the notion that each of us is measurable by a numerical IQ is still a part of the culture.
As for the tests’ content, some cultural biases have been corrected—but others have not. In the Scholastic Aptitude Test, for instance, a majority of reading-comprehension passages use descriptions of accomplishments in science, politics, sports, and the like, thus becoming more “user-friendly” to many white, male, and middle-class test-takers than to others. Even the math and reasoning problems are often expressed in impersonal, distant-from-life examples that are more part of male than female socialization. Phyllis Rosser, an expert on the gender bias of SATs, has documented the negative impact of these masculine contexts on female test-takers.43
David White, a Harvard Law School graduate in California who coaches candidates in the fine art of surviving the LSATs for entry into law school, says that efforts to make the questions more hospitable to women and people of color sometimes reflect limited thinking in themselves. Having noticed that the word feminism only appeared in wrong answers, for instance, he offered a dollar to any student who found it in a right one—and he didn’t have to pay off until 1989. White also points out LSAT questions like the one asking for logical arguments against slavery, but in the context of statements from slaves who support it; or in which the test thesis is women’s damage to the country and to children when they are in the paid labor force.44
An African-American critic named Robert Williams introduced some humor into the testing debate by inventing the Black Intelligence Test Counterbalanced for Honkies: BITCH. “Is it more indicative of intelligence to know Malcolm X’s last name,” he asked, or the author of Hamlet? I ask you now when is Washington’s birthday? Perhaps 99 percent of you thought February 22,. The answer presupposes a white form. I actually meant Booker T. Washington’s. … What is the color of bananas? Many of you would say yellow. By the time the banana has made it to my community, to the ghetto, it is brown with yellow spots. What is the correct thing to do if another child hits you …? … For survival purposes, children in Black communities are taught to hit back; however that response receives zero credit on current intelligence tests such as the Stanford-Binet.
But his point and conclusion are serious. “The Black child does quite well in coping with his home and neighborhood environment, but does poorly in the school system. He clearly shows every indication of brightness at home. It is incumbent upon educators to develop appropriate learning experiences … and not the other way around.”45
The defense of testing is often as tautological as craniology’s assumption that smaller skulls must have been female because female skulls are smaller: If female, nonwhite, and lower-class test-takers don’t do well with material dictated by the mainstream, say the tests’ defenders, then they won’t do well in the mainstream. The undiscussed question here is who and what defines mainstream. Females of all races, men of color, plus men of a different class or sexuality make up the huge majority of the country; yet they are supposed to let a small (white, male, middle-class, heterosexual) minority decide what is important to know, think, and value.
In other words, to do well on such tests, many of us are creating a false self for test-taking and educational purposes, and submerging a true one.
All criticism and legal challenges notwithstanding, paper tests are still the single most powerful, socially approved tool of human differentiation. And even when tests are downplayed as part of affirmative-action programs, there is often some stigma of lowered standards even though they have little relationship to academic performance and none to accomplishment after graduation.
But perhaps more tragic than their external use is the influence these scores have on students’ self-estimates. “All the things an adolescent can be,” mourned Thomas Anthony, dean of admissions at Colgate University, “are reduced to a three-digit number.”
Testing has lost some of its ability to justify hierarchies, however, and so yet another branch of science has been born. In 1975, “sociobiology” was officially named and defined as “the study of biological bases of human social behavior.” Though this new specialty bows to social change by regretting rather than celebrating birth-determined hierarchies, it still devotes itself to proving their inevitability. Here are some quotations from the latest scientists of human difference:46
It isn’t difficult to counter arguments like those. For instance: Eggs are actually hardier and longer-lived than sperm. If a female is interested in searching out a male with the best genes, she is being active rather than passive and “coy.” If racial discrimination were genetic, why would so many barriers against intermarriage have been necessary? If biology rules, where does the will not to have children come from? Or the determination to regulate fertility? And finally, men were never all hunters in every culture, humans were never all men, and the question of what is “worth noting” depends on who’s doing the noting.
But why should we have to counter these arguments? The very purpose of sociobiology is one that we should question. Its raison d'être in the world at large is to explain and support group differences; that is, to prove that the existing social order, unjust or not, is pretty much inevitable. But since the differences between and among individuals within any group are greater than the differences between groups, why focus on birth-determined categories at all? Fortunately, challenges have been mounted, and thanks to a new confidence brought by social-justice movements, often with humor. When the “math gene” argument for male high achievers surfaced again in the media in the late 1980s, for instance, Jane Pauley, then the cohost of Today on NBC-TV, discomfited her two biodeterminist guests by asking if this meant males who were bad at math were not “real men.”
The hormone-influenced, “right-brain” (masculine) “left-brain” (feminine) theory that is the most popular concept of modern biodeterminism is also under attack. By using biofeedback, women and men have been able to shift the balance of electrically measured brain activity back and forth between hemispheres at will. Moreover, the left hemisphere is specialized to analytical and logical tasks that are “masculine” as well as verbal skills that are “feminine,” while the right hemisphere governs spatial and visual tasks that are math-related and “masculine,” but also intuitive or associative thinking of a kind supposed to be “feminine.” Thus, in cultural terms, each hemisphere is androgynous.
But there is a predisposition toward theories that justify a current power structure—the familiar problem of “If you’re so smart why aren’t you rich?” Even when the scientist in question tries to make clear that a physical, brain-centered finding may be the result of either nurture or nature, behavior or birth, there is a tendency to distort the meaning. For example, when Dr. Simon Le Vay of the Salk Institute of California, himself a homosexual, announced in the fall of 1991 that a salt-grain-sized part of the hypothalamus was found to be slightly smaller in gay men than in heterosexual men (on the basis of autopsies performed on nineteen gay and sixteen heterosexual men who had died of AIDS), much of the media misinterpreted these findings to mean that gay men were “born that way” (though Le Vay himself made clear that he did not know whether this difference was present at birth), and also that these results included lesbians—who were not part of the study at all. Even worse than this distortion, however, were the uses to which it was put. As Frances Kunreuther of the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York, a social-service agency for gay and lesbian young people, pointed out in the midst of this media controversy: “The issue is not what causes sexual orientation, but the reaction to it. And that reaction leads to suicides. It causes gay people to be beaten up, to be thrown out of their homes, to be in incredible isolation.”47
Rita Arditti, a biologist who is innovating forms of instruction that are experiential, not just intellectual, looks forward to a new kind of education that frees us to trust our instincts, expand our capabilities, and study human possibilities instead of limitations. “Today in science,” she points out, “we know ‘more and more’ about ‘less and less.’ … The emphasis on the analytical method as the only way of knowing has led to a mechanistic view of Nature and human beings.” As she and many other new scientists believe, the point is linking, not ranking, a dissolving of boundaries and categories, not an argument over where individuals or kinds of knowledge fit. In her words: “The task that seems of primary importance—for women and men—is to convert science from what it is today, a social institution with a conservative function and a defensive stand, into a liberating and healthy activity. Science needs a soul which would show respect and love for its subjects of study and would stress harmony and communication with the rest of the universe.”48
Until education is reformed along the lines suggested by Rita Arditti, being alert to its problems is a first step. Neither people it falsely aggrandizes nor those it falsely deflates are being allowed an authentic self and individual response. I was reminded of this when I met a young, highly educated, well-to-do young man who told me that he was spending one entire year without reading books, reviews, or anything else of an interpretive nature. He wanted to discover his own responses and to experience life unmediated.
But for those who are diminished or excluded, this awareness is especially important. Those least likely to be included in the current curriculum are also most likely to need degrees to move upward. I remember feeling that need strongly when I was in college and heard about a New York law school that had an experimental program: students could enter as juniors and turn their last undergraduate year into their first year of law school. Surely, a law degree would be the ultimate protection against ending up back in Toledo or in a life anything like my mother’s, I thought, but when I talked to my college vocational adviser, she explained that women lawyers usually did research or wills and estates. (“No client or a dead client,” as I later heard this rule explained.) Thus, I could end up doing research in the back room of some big law firm, or, as she pointed out cheerfully, I could graduate from Smith and do research right away. Suddenly, a law degree didn’t seem so attractive after all.
But now, for those who are forewarned and trust their own responses, education can be a very different experience. I heard that kind of story from an elegant black woman in her late thirties while I was visiting Detroit. This woman explained that she had first seen Ms. magazine in a Michigan prison when she was serving time for prostitution. After reading an issue or two, she had begun to wonder: “Why am I in prison, but my customer and my pimp are not? If prostitution is a crime, why is the seller arrested—but not the buyer?”
Remembering a movie about a prisoner who had read law books and become his own advocate, she went to the prison library. In her state, she was told, only men’s prisons had law books. Made more rebellious by this news, she organized a few other women prisoners to protest. When the state’s criminal-code books finally arrived, she began reading, and soon she was answering questions for other prisoners about their problems of regaining custody of children put in foster homes, or getting children job training to support themselves. Once out of prison, she went to a local women’s law firm for a clerical job. Knowing motivation when they saw it, they hired her.
To make an extraordinary story short, she passed a high school equivalency exam, entered college at night, and gradually moved from filing, to secretarial, and then to paralegal work. Some years later, she finished law school itself.
“So now I’m a lawyer,” she explained with a smile. “I thought you just might like to know.”
That story made me think about the contrast between my own easy “giving up” and this woman’s tenacity. Because she was motivated by the human impact of her learning, she had inspiration and purpose. Because she hadn’t been educated in why the system was right, she could more easily see where it was wrong. Because she had little outside authority to unlearn, she could trust authority within herself.
But whoever we are, we can go beyond learning with no will of our own—and beyond what Herbert Kohl called willful “not-learning”—to following our interests and passions. We, too, can decide how to value our educations—instead of letting them value us.
[[Footnotes]]
* For remedial reading, see Appendix II, History As If Everybody Mattered.
* In the all-important Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for college entrance, a monitor reads instructions like the following from the 1988–89 Supervisor’s Manual: “Scores on these tests are based on the number of questions answered correctly minus a fraction (¼ point per question) of the number of questions answered incorrectly. Therefore, random or haphazard guessing is unlikely to change your scores.” Because girls are more likely to follow instructions—and more hesitant to guess when they’re not positive of the answer—they often penalize themselves by failing to follow a hunch as much as boys do on the SATs. As Carol Gilligan put it, “This test is a moral issue for girls; they think it is an indication of their intelligence, so they must not cheat. Boys play it like a pinball game.” Phyllis Rosser, The SAT Gender Gap: Identifying the Causes, Washington, D.C.: Center for Women Policy Studies, April 1989, p. 64.
* Other interesting findings: women’s career plans became more limited than they had been at college entry; and “religiosity is negatively correlated with women’s presence in nontraditional majors …” (p. 17). The Astin study showed that women in coeducational schools also became less politically liberal than they had been, while men became more liberal. At single-sex colleges, women complained less about the absence of men than men did about the absence of women.
* After this realization, she blended personal history and historical research to write Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, from which the above quote was taken, p. 105), a book that gives readers a glimpse of the importance of gay culture.
* Until the civil rights movement of the 1960s changed the racial atmosphere and the laws, “miscegenation” was one of the most inflexibly punished crimes, without even the extenuating circumstances allowed for murder. Black men accused of it could be lynched, with or without trial. During slavery, if white women entered an interracial relationship willingly, they could be imprisoned or sold off as indentured servants and their mixed-race children sold as slaves. Post-slavery, such women became social outcasts unless they testified that they had been taken by force. (See In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process by A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.)
Among the many victims of such antimiscegenation laws were Asian men brought to this country by the thousands in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century as workers—forbidden to bring wives from their own countries, and also forbidden to marry non-Asians here—some of whom are still living.
* Another ill-fated craniological effort tried to relate facial planes and intelligence. The forehead slant and protruding nose of white males—compared to the smaller nose of females or flatter nose of African and Asian males—was thought to signify mental power. This theory foundered on the fact that animals also had protruding nasal structures; for instance, anteaters.
One argument that was never resolved: Were female skulls inferior to those of white males because they were more round (like children’s) or more elongated (like Negroes’)?
* Other assumptions were errors, too. Later clinical tests showed females in general to be more sensitive to pain, and to sound and touch, than males in general; a difference that itself turned out to be environmental, not innate. Parents tend to “toughen” male babies by ignoring their cries and by holding and cuddling them less than females. The evolutionist assumption that Northern European cultures were the oldest and most evolved has been overturned by such discoveries as the oldest known human skeleton, a woman named “Lucy” by paleoanthropologists, who lived on the African continent some three million years ago.
* Because the G.I. Bill of Rights provided encouragement and subsidy, veterans were often admitted regardless of test scores. In the eyes of some educators, that group’s record of later accomplishments proved that motivation is a better predictor of performance than aptitude and IQ tests. Of course, severe limits on women’s participation in the military had kept them out of this postwar flood of free education, too, just as “veterans’ preference” for jobs advanced men in the workplace.