antage over the
teacher in acquiring facility in the use of intelligence tests.

As for parents, it would of course be unreasonable to expect from them a
very accurate judgment regarding the mental peculiarities of their
children. The difficulty is not simply that which comes from lack of
special training. The presence of parental affection renders impartial
judgment impossible. Still more serious are the effects of habituation
to the child's mental traits. As a result of such habituation the most
intelligent parent tends to develop an unfortunate blindness to all
sorts of abnormalities which exist in his own children.

The only way of escape from the fallacies we have mentioned lies in the
use of some kind of refined psychological procedure. Binet testing is
destined to become universally known and practiced in schools, prisons,
reformatories, charity stations, orphan asylums, and even ordinary
homes, for the same reason that Babcock testing has become universal in
dairying. Each is indispensable to its purpose.

CHAPTER III

DESCRIPTION OF THE BINET-SIMON METHOD

ESSENTIAL NATURE OF THE SCALE. The Binet scale is made up of an extended
series of tests in the nature of "stunts," or problems, success in which
demands the exercise of intelligence. As left by Binet, the scale
consists of 54 tests, so graded in difficulty that the easiest lie well
within the range of normal 3-year-old children, while the hardest tax
the intelligence of the average adult. The problems are designed
primarily to test native intelligence, not school knowledge or home
training. They try to answer the question "How intelligent is this
child?" How much the child has learned is of significance only in so far
as it throws light on his ability to learn more.

Binet fully appreciated the fact that intelligence is not homogeneous,
that it has many aspects, and that no one kind of test will display it
adequately. He therefore assembled for his intelligence scale tests of
many different types, some of them designed to display differences of
memory, others differences in power to reason, ability to compare, power
of comprehension, time orientation, facility in the use of number
concepts, power to combine ideas into a meaningful whole, the maturity
of apperception, wealth of ideas, knowledge of common objects, etc.

HOW THE SCALE WAS DERIVED. The tests were arranged in order of
difficulty, as found by trying them upon some 200 normal childre