Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940
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The appeal to science as the embodiment of certainty, the insistence that his particular specialism conforms to a model derived from the ‘hardest’ physical science, is a familiar, even a commonplace, phenomenon among nineteenth- and twentieth-century social scientists. The new specialism of the psychology of individual differences, emerging from the turn of the century, was no exception to this, nor was its principal field of application, education. The proponents of mental measurement, or psychometrics, as some of them chose to call it, offered it to teachers and educational administrators as the new technology which would at last enable the theory and practice of education to attain scientific status. This essay
The bulk of the work upon which this essay is based was funded by the Social Science Research Council and I am glad to acknowledge their generous support. In particular, their grant enabled Dr Stephen Sharp, now of the Godfrey Thomson Unit, University of Edinburgh, to work with me for two years and I am grateful for his help in collecting and analysing some of the data here discussed. A version of this was first presented at a conference in Aberdeen on The Scientific Movement in Educational Research, 15–17 September 1979, sponsored by the S.S.R.C. and the Scottish History of Education Society; and its substance is being published also by Aberdeen University Press in the proceedings of that conference under the title The Meritocratic Intellect, edited by David Hamilton and J.V. Smith. […]
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