单选题
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About the time that
schools and others quite reasonably became interested in seeing to it that all
children, whatever their background, were fairly treated, intelligence testing
became unpopular.
Some thought it was unfair to minority
children. Through the past few decades such testing has gone out of fashion and
many communities have indeed forbidden it.
However,
paradoxically, just recently a group of black parents filed a lawsuit (诉讼) in
California claiming that the state's ban on IQ testing discriminates against
their children by denying them the opportunity to take the test. (They believed,
correctly, that IQ tests are a valid method of evaluating children for special
education classes. ) The judge, therefore, reversed, at least partially, his
original decision.
And so the argument goes on and on. Does it
benefit or harm children from minority groups to have their intelligence tested?
We have always been on the side of permitting, even facilitating, such testing.
If a child of any color or group is doing poorly in school it seems to us very
important to know whether it is because he or she is of low intelligence, or
whether some other factor is the cause.
What school and family
can do to improve poor performance is influenced by its cause. It is not
discriminative to evaluate either a child's physical condition or his
intellectual level.
Unfortunately, intellectual level seems to
be a sensitive subject, and what the law allows us to do varies from time to
time. The same fluctuation back and forth occurs in areas other than
intelligence. Thirty years or so ago, for instance, white families were
encouraged to adopt black children. It was considered discriminative not to do
so.
And then tile style changed and this cross-racial adopting
became generally unpopular, and social agencies felt that black children should
go to black families only. It is hard to say what are the best procedures.
But surely good will on the part of all of us is needed.
As to
intelligence, in our opinion, the more we know about any child's intellectual
level, the better for the child in question.