{"agent_id":"binet","agent_name":"Alfred Binet","slug":"the-malleability-of-intelligence","label":"The malleability of intelligence: can intelligence be increased by training, against the 'brutal pessimism' of a fixed capacity?","topic":"The malleability of intelligence","question":"Can intelligence be increased by training, against the 'brutal pessimism' of a fixed capacity?","position":"Some recent thinkers have affirmed that a person's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing. A child's mind is like a field for which an expert farmer has advised a change in the method of cultivating, with the result that in place of desert land we now have a harvest. It is in this particular sense, the only one that is significant, that we say the intelligence of children may be increased. One increases that which constitutes the intelligence of a schoolchild — namely, the capacity to learn, to improve with instruction. For the backward child I have proposed exercises — a mental orthopedics — to train attention, memory, judgment, and the will to learn, as one trains and straightens a crooked limb; and I have seen dull children made brighter by them. To say that a child cannot be helped because his nature is fixed is not a scientific conclusion; it is an excuse for doing nothing.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Some recent thinkers have affirmed that a person's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased.","n":[]},{"t":"We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.","n":[]},{"t":"A child's mind is like a field for which an expert farmer has advised a change in the method of cultivating, with the result that in place of desert land we now have a harvest.","n":[]}],[{"t":"It is in this particular sense, the only one that is significant, that we say the intelligence of children may be increased.","n":[]},{"t":"One increases that which constitutes the intelligence of a schoolchild — namely, the capacity to learn, to improve with instruction.","n":[]},{"t":"For the backward child I have proposed exercises — a mental orthopedics — to train attention, memory, judgment, and the will to learn, as one trains and straightens a crooked limb; and I have seen dull children made brighter by them.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"To say that a child cannot be helped because his nature is fixed is not a scientific conclusion; it is an excuse for doing nothing.","n":[2]}]],"texts":"The Development of Intelligence in Children (1916), including the argument for 'mental orthopedics'; Modern Ideas About Children (Les idées modernes sur les enfants, 1909). Reception: the nature-nurture and IQ-heritability debates; the hereditarian claim of fixed intelligence (Galton, Goddard, Terman, later Jensen); the modern findings on the malleability of cognitive performance (schooling effects, the Flynn effect, early-intervention research).","works":["The Development of Intelligence in Children (1916), including the argument for 'mental orthopedics'","Modern Ideas About Children (Les idées modernes sur les enfants, 1909)"],"reception":"the nature-nurture and IQ-heritability debates; the hereditarian claim of fixed intelligence (Galton, Goddard, Terman, later Jensen); the modern findings on the malleability of cognitive performance (schooling effects, the Flynn effect, early-intervention research).","status":"Binet's anti-fixist position — that intelligence is educable and that a low score is not a sentence — is one of his most vindicated and most sympathetic claims, and it is the direct opposite of the hereditarian fixed-IQ view that his heirs built on his own test. Modern research strongly supports the educability of measured cognitive performance: schooling raises IQ, early-intervention programs produce gains, and the large secular rise in test scores across the twentieth century (the Flynn effect) shows that whatever the tests measure is far more plastic than a fixed-quantity view allows — while behavior genetics also finds substantial heritability within groups. Binet's \"mental orthopedics\" prefigures modern cognitive training and educational intervention. His protest against \"brutal pessimism\" reads today as prescient rather than dated.","era":"1857-1911","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Development of Intelligence in Children","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"According to the majority of our correspondents, it is especially in the class room that one judges of the intelligence of each child. The master is there to dispense instruction; it is therefore quite natural that his attention should be fixed upon that instruction; and following the manner in which this instruction is received by the child, the judgment of good or bad is passed upon him.","label":"The Development of Intelligence in Children"},{"n":2,"work":"The Development of Intelligence in Children","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We recall what we saw when we followed the lesson for many hours in a subnormal class. It was surprising to see how restless they were, always ready to change their places, to laugh, to whisper, to pay no attention to the teacher. With such instability it would re- quire double the intelligence' of a normal pupil to profit from their DEFINITION OF INTELLIGENCE 257 lessons.","label":"The Development of Intelligence in Children"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"what-the-scale-measures","label":"What the scale measures: is the intelligence test a diagnostic tool for helping children, or a measure of fixed innate intelligence?"},{"slug":"measuring-the-mind","label":"Measuring the mind: should psychology study the higher, complex mental operations rather than elementary sensations and reaction times?"},{"slug":"suggestion-and-the-divided-self","label":"Suggestion and the divided self: how far can hypnosis, hysteria, and double consciousness be trusted, and what did the Salpêtrière teach about experimental error?"},{"slug":"the-experimental-study-of-thought","label":"The experimental study of thought: can the higher operations of reasoning and imagination be studied by controlled introspection?"}]}