Here's the way Scott Barry Kaufman tells the story of Alfred Binet, the inventor of the modern IQ test.
As the nineteenth century came to an end, business and civic leaders across a number of West European and North American countries united to promote compulsory universal public education. But this posed a serious problem: how should a diverse population of children be educated?
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The opportunity of a lifetime {for Binet} came in October 1904, when Joseph Chaumie, the {French} minister of public instruciton, established a commission to create a way to identify students in need of alternative education.....Binet and {Theodore} Simon immediately went to work.
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Binet and Simon made clear the purpose of their test:
Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded. We should, therefore, study his condition at that time and that time only. We have nothing to do either with his past history or his future; consequently we shall neglect his etiology, and we shall make no attempt to distinguish between acquired and congenital idiocy...we do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improbable. We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth about his present mental state.....
Along with their test, they also published a number of caveats. First, they made it clear that their test does not measure a person's absolute level of intelligence. They warned that their test couldn't possibly offer precise measurement like inches as measured by a ruler. Instead, a score on their test was simply a classification entirely relative to that of other children of the same age. ....
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Binet and Simon also acknowledged that many others than intellectual ability could influence performance on their tests, such as the unnaturalness of the testing situation and the potential for the test to intimidate children. They also mentioned longer term influences, such as background, upbringing, health and effort. Due to these other potential influences, they stressed the need to compare any person's test results only with those of comparable backgrounds. Finally, they noted the importance of constant retesting, pointing out that individuals' intellectual development progresses at variable rates, due to different rates of maturation as well as differences in intellectual experiences.
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It's noteworthy that the Binet-Simon scale never yielded an intelligence quotient (IQ). In fact, long after Binet's death, Simon indicated that the use of a summary IQ score was a betrayal of the purpose of their test. While Binet and Simon's purpose was noble, let's be absolutely clear: most people in France just wanted to weed out the intellectually disabled os that the "normal" students would not be slowed down.
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Alas, Binet's efforts, caveats and cautions were almost completely ignored by the French establishment...Binet and Simon's efforts were wasted in their native France. Binet personally felt as though he was a failure.
Soon his test would spread like wildfire across the globe-- particularly in America-- and to his horror, his test was used for purposes he never intended. Toward the very end of his life, in response to statements that children with low test scores would never achieve certain things, he wrote in exasperation: "Never! What a strong word! A few modern philosphers seem to lend their moral support to the these deplorable verdicts when they assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism. We shall attempt to prove that it is without foundation... With practice, training , and above all method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before."
Binet even developed various "mental orthopedics" -- intellectual exercises -- to show the potential for remediation. But it was too late. On October 28, 1911, Binet suffered a stroke and passed away at the young age of 54. The mass testing movement in America had just begun, with the testing proponents carrying with them a completely different conceptualization of human intelligence.
