Library Collections: Document: Full Text

Taking 1900 as the year when the average soldier was at school, what is the average index for these groups of States?

Now, in this list the New England States rank third on the tests, second in education; the East North Central States fifth in both; the West North Central fourth in tests, sixth in education; the Mountain States second in tests, fourth in education; the Pacific States first in tests, third in education; the Mid-South Atlantic States seventh in both the South Atlantic ninth in tests, tenth in education; the East South Central tenth in tests, ninth in education; the West South Central eighth in both.

The one group in which the correspondence is not pretty close is the Mid-Atlantic group, consisting of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This group ranks first in education, but only sixth in the tests. The black sheep in this group is, for some strange reason, New Jersey, with an intelligence test score (48.7) far below any other Northern State. The Mid-Atlantic group without New Jersey would rank fourth rather than sixth, ahead of all regions except New England and the Far-Western groups.

These figures are based on the school systems of the year 1900. They may measure roughly the efficiency of the schools in that year.

But suppose we ask ourselves which school systems were most progressive relative to the others? For it is a fair assumption that a school system which is improving is likely to be better in quality than one which is just holding its own.

If you rank these groups of States in the order in which, according to the material furnished by Ayres' Index, they made the greatest gains from 1890 to 1918, you arrive at the following result:

Now this would seem to argue that schools on the whole produce better scores in the intelligence tests. But if it does, the claim of the testers that they measure the original endowment of the racial stock collapses. Therefore, in order to overcome the correlation between schooling and scores, it becomes necessary for the tester to argue that superior stock is responsible for high scores and good schools, inferior stock for poorer scores and poorer schools.

Before we accept any such far-fetched conclusion, it is well to exhaust the common-sense explanations. Schools cost money. Is there any correspondence between the rank of these groups of States in intelligence scores, school improvement, and per capita income?

The really striking thing about this table is the great difference in per capita income between the three groups of Southern States and all the others. They all fall below $500, whereas no other group, except the Mid-South Atlantic is below $600. That may be an explanation of why their school systems are the poorest, and this in turn may be some part of the explanation of why their intelligence tests are the poorest.

In order to explain away these figures, your radical tester has to argue that poorer scores, poorer schools, and less wealth are all the results of inferior stock. The intelligence scores, remember, are for the white draft only, the educational index and income are, of course, for both negroes and whites. Probably, if negro schools were omitted from the figures for the Southern States, their educational index would improve somewhat, but not enough, I believe, to alter the general result. On the other hand, separating negro and white schools in the South would almost certainly tend to make a closer correspondence between the intelligence test of the Southern negro and his educational opportunities.

The testers are all the time talking about superior and inferior stocks. Their explanation of the whole business is in these terms. They claim that officers as a class are biologically superior to the native white men, the native white men biologically superior to the foreign-born whites from Ireland and southeastern Europe, the recent immigrants superior to the negroes, the Northern negroes superior to the Southern. They speak of racial superiority when they mean superiority in the intelligence tests, for they are determined to believe that the tests measure the quality of the race rather than a mixture of race, opportunity, and education.