Ability range

in secondary schools and higher life and • academic But the Report said nothing Teacher then so good. London wrote a letter to say that Special Correspondent was actually giving in to the basic idea of these right-wingers by accepting the concept of intelligence' at all.

This, said London Teacher, was an 'idealist abstraction' and a 'fraudulent theory'.

SC replied that it was no more an idealist abstraction than 'gravity'; both concepts express something real. LT's method, according to SC, is simply to repeat phrases from Marx and ignore scientific development, an 'extremely harmful' method of thinking.

Scientific

SC then returned to a more detailed defence of the concept of 'intelligence'. He claims it Is a scientific concept, whereas London Teacher sees it only as 'designed to justify an educational system which condemns the vast mass of the working class to cultural backwardness'.

I do not think we need at this stage to say any more than has been said about the bias against working-class children from intelligence testing as a method of educational selection.

More fundamental is the question of method, and of the philosophical basis of the discussion begun by Special Correspondent. schools driven working-class children out, they have actually crippled their performance while encouraging that of middle-class children.

The Robbins Report into Higher Education showed that a child of professional parents classified at Il into the lowest third of the ability range was likely to become a better O-level candidate than the lower working- CLASS Despite these many interesting observations and correct conclusions from scientific data, SC still seems intelligence to find the concept sort of will o' the wisp. rather elusive, For example, he several times asserts that it is not hereditary intelligence which determines learning capacity, but: "intelligence results from the interaction of environment and constitution (or heredity)'.

However, in all the examples he gives, the hereditary factors are physiological defects which require certain environmental factors in order to be overcome.

He does not (and he cannot) produce a single example where it is possible to isolate by scientific investigation a definite material propensity to superior or interior intelligence, so that we could conclude: Other things (i.e. 'environment') being equal, this individual will be more intelligent or less intelligent than that individual.

The intelligence or general mental ability, if it means anything, is always a product of a learning process. There is no evidence to prove that SC's 'hereditary' component in the interaction that produces intelligence is responsible for variations in the 'intelligence' which results.

Indeed, as SC himself sugmiddle-class teacher. This is so in both Britain and the United States (see Martin Deutsch "The Disadvantaged Learning Process, 1963). Morethe effects of these class differences become more marked as the children grow older.

This is because learning and intellectual development general is not simply a process of maturing, but is the result of the interaction of the human organism and its environment (see, for example, the work of gests, there is little to object to in the conclusion, of Bloom from his large volume of experimental observation:

"That most people are capable learning anything they possess both the will to and virtually unlimited time'. Of. course, both these latter factors can result only from social conditions.

It is tempting for materialists to accept that, since thinking is the work of a material organthe brain (which is subject to the laws of heredity)-then mental abilities will be affected by hereditary differences in the brain.

It involved special remedial classes, attempts to improve the 'motivation' of the pupil and the creation of better facilities in the schools.

The 'Project Literacy', organized at Cornell University in 1964, and numerous similar schemes, aimed at providing stimulation (lor example, through nursery schools) lacking in the home.

'Project head-start', also started in 1964, tried a system of admitting 'deprived' children to child development centres for eightever, the fact that the concept stubbornly persists despite this suggests that it is ideologically important, 1.e., it corresponds to certain blind spots in the world outlook of bourgeois scientists.

It enables their scientific psychological work to continue without coming into conflict with their class horizons. These class horizons require concepts suited to a class-divided system of education and a continuance of exploitation of the working. class.

The philosophical roots of a concept like 'intelligence' are not, ot course, directly these needs of the capitalist educational system when discussing the British grammar schools, the education system is constructed deliberately to act against the interests of working-class children.

They are required to produce a mass of factory fodder, with few bright ones to staff the universities, laboratories, courts, newspapers etc.

It is this class system, of which the schools are a part, which deliberately holds down the mass of working-class children. name 'g', supposedly the ability to observe relationships.

However much anyone wants to say that Spearman's ideas were taken over and adapted to even less scientific views like those of Binet with his 'general intelligence', , it does not alter the fact that Spearman himself was here isolating in his conclusions (not in reality) something taking us back to the idealist philosophy which was most consistently expressed in the ideas of Emmanuel Kant.

Unfavourable

Kant wanted to recognize the existence of an objective world