What procedures did Goddard suggest for stopping the deterioration of intelligence in the United States? In suggesting these procedures, what assumption did he make?
Henry Herbert Goddard was the first person to translate the Binet-Simon’s scale of intelligence from French to English. In fact, he translated all of Binet and Simon’s published works into English and after the death of Binet, Goddard became a leading proponent of Binet’s methods of measurement of intelligence and mental age of a person.
He found the Binet-Simon scale and its methods were quite effective in distinguishing children, who were mentally retarded, that is, in finding out their degree of retardation. Though using Binet’s methods of calculating intelligence, Goddard supported the Galton-Cattell-Spearman’s views that intelligence is rather an inherited virtue.
His belief was based on his own observation that some ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘slightly retarded’ children of a school, where he was a teacher, often had siblings who were of lower intelligence or intellect.
Goddard suggested that many of the immigrants to the USA (United States of America) before and after the First World War and Great Depression were mentally defective and proposed that they should be deported from the USA in stopping the deterioration of intelligence in the country.
Goddard was invited by the Commissioner of Immigration to Ellis Islands to observe the European immigrants who had come. He claimed he could tell that many of those immigrants were mentally unstable or had some mental deficiency just by looking at them and their physical characteristics.
To be sure, he administered them to the Binet-Simon scale of intelligence. The result of the tests proved his notion and based on his findings, thousands of immigrants were deported from the USA.
In suggesting these procedures, Goddard assumed that the poor test results of the immigrants were due to their inherited intelligence and not due to their personal, educational or cultural experiences.
Goddard’s assumption was certainly not proper and humane, because the immigrants were a group of frightened, tortured people, who had lost everything and had left their countries under special circumstances. These factors influenced the test performance regarding ‘intelligence’. Further, the immigrants often spoke a different language than English and the translators’ perfection who worked in conducting the tests was taken on faith.
Gould (1981) also put forward the above arguments in describing Goddard’s methods. However, due to Goddard’s methods of intelligence testing, deportation of immigrants increased greatly, 350 % in the year 1913 and 570 % in the year 1914.