I drove one late summer morning from Ohio’s rural southwest to its industrial northeast to visit the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. Although the subject still seemed new and foreign, the environment was familiar. After I checked in for my appointment, I sat at one of the twenty large desks aligned in a rank-and-file grid. The archivist wheeled out several boxes of files I had ordered and parked it near my desk.
I made the trip to Akron to study the papers of Henry Goddard, the psychologist who transformed the IQ test into a systematic method of social classification. I had already read many of Goddard’s published papers before making the drive, but I wanted to see the archive for myself. I hoped that looking at his drafts, his private papers, his letters, might give me a better understanding of how Goddard’s research still informs my daughter’s future, and how different it can be from the lives of the children who Goddard studied.
After giving IQ tests to thousands of children, Goddard proposed that “idiot” would be used to describe those who demonstrated intelligence no higher than a two-year-old. Those who had intelligence from three to seven years would be “imbeciles.” For a third grouping, those with a mental age from eight to twelve, Goddard proposed a new term, “moron.” “Our public school systems are full of them,” Goddard wrote, “and yet Superintendents and Boards of Education are struggling to make normal people out of them.” The IQ test could identify these students and place them in institutions, where Goddard thought they belonged. His recommendations, based on an IQ score, set the stage for institutions and segregated special needs classrooms for most of the twentieth century.
I paged through cold, clinical records of children that Goddard studied at the Training School, an institution in Vineland, New Jersey. I studied photographs of children in well-kept dresses and neatly pressed suits lined up on benches. These children rose up as ghosts in my mind. I thought about how they might have lived as apparitions for their families too. They still existed yet were kept away, out of sight and without a chance to really live, grow, and learn. As I looked at these ghosts, I thought about my daughter and felt both grateful to not be living in this ugly era of history and threatened by its lingering effects in the present.