Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and How to Use ItTrabue, Marion Rex
Science
Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and How to Use It
Trabue, Marion Rex
Educational tests and measurements; Intelligence tests; Psychological tests
The percentage of persons in our population who cannot successfully
think and work with abstract symbols and verbal ideas is very much
greater than most of us have been inclined to believe. We have stated or
implied that any boy who would stay in school long enough might fit
himself to become a United States Senator or possibly a great newspaper
editor, or lawyer. Those pupils who found it impossible to assimilate
the type of thing that was offered by the public schools have been
eliminated and sent out into the industrial world to find materials
which would correspond to their interests.
Educators have still further made the error of saying or implying that
it was the inferior people who were thus forced out of school. The
authors of the present book wish to assert their belief that the mind of
a man whose interests lie in handling people and concrete objects is not
at all inferior on that account to the mind of the man who handles ideas
and abstract conceptions.
Measures of intelligence have in the past been chiefly those which would
be favourable to the abstract thinker. The Alpha test, used in the Army,
proved conclusively to those who studied the results most carefully,
that fully half of our population can never succeed, even moderately, in
the manipulation of abstract ideas. The large proportion of our boys and
girls who come to school are absolutely doomed to be unsuccessful and to
become discouraged in their attempts to progress in the courses which
are commonly given, and yet the public supports these schools, and the
administrators of these schools try to claim that they offer “equal
opportunity to all.” Actually the kind of opportunity offered can be
used effectively by only a small percentage of the pupils. Unless the
child has the ability to interpret symbols and juggle ideas he is
declared to be inferior and is forced out to learn for himself how to
earn a living and to secure his rights.
The Mentimeter tests and other measures of intellectual abilities
provide the means whereby pupils may be classified, at the very
beginning of their education, according to the degree to which the
formal academic training will be assimilated. These tests make it
possible to select those who do not think abstractly but who require
concrete objects or persons as the material for their mental activity.
Unless the public recognizes that it owes an appropriate education to
these people just as surely as it does to the academic few, it will not
be long until this great group, in which our present schools develop the
habit of failure and discontent, will arise to overthrow the injustices
which our past aristocratic organization of society has handed on to
them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account