Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1927-06-06
THIS AND THAT


place Of truth. When a man Of prom
| inence is accused, invariably he de-
clares. "A pure fabrication!' and often
enough he "gets away with it," too.
There should be not an iota of
guesswork, hodever, in dealing with
so precious an asset as the children
of the land. What would an intelli-
gence test have made of little Ludwig
van Beethoven? Even as man he
couldn't add, and as for multiplying
and dividing, he might as well have
ATTEMPTED to fly. His mind was not
quick" He had no hair-trigger re-
actions. Perhaps he would have been
put down with mental age" far
below his years, when all along he
was centuries ahead Of his time when
it came to music.
We do not believe that God has en-.
dowed any one in the world with in
fallible methods of determining how
any child should be 'classed." Some
children class themselves. but 1t takes
several years to do it, and no one else
with a paper pad and pencil can
come in and place a judgment upon
them. Even the Lord doesn't try to.
He let's child work out it's own saliva
ton to q certain extent at least. Some
times it takes a man all his life to
come to himself" And surely it will
do him no good to feel in his sensitive
childhood that some expert" has dis
missed him into the group of those
who are not quite as quick" as some
other Of his comrades.
y X X
It simply isn't a fair proposition,
because it neither is natures way nor
mans way. Such "tests,' in our
opinion, are bowling Of the knee to
the modern and heather god Of the
city, which lives in New York, and
which puts cleverness ahead of
righteousness, and quickness in ad-
vance of thoroughness.
Nature does not say to a. child,
Here. after celebrating upon your
case, 1 put you down in the mentally
competent class. And you, buddy, 1
put down with the slower kids, whose
reactions are not according to Hoyle-
er-Jung. Now, children, do not con-
tradict your old mother. have stud
led under DR.. Brill and know my
onions, the slang phrase has it. /
have a little black notebook here and
can fit you into the very place where
you belong. In fact, I get huge
satisfaction out of doing it. It pleases
my own inferiority complex, just be-
tween us, to juggle thus with boys
and girls who some day will be vastly
my superiorS!'
Nor does the world Of men deal with
mon so. In particular, the business
world, that great Babbittry upon
which the United States leans as a
child upon its father, laughs to scorn
any provision in manpower. Until a
young fellow gets a chance to work
himself out, the biggest" banker that
ever lived would not attempt to stick
a pin into him with a label onto it.
Why, only the other day we heard of
a young middle-aged man leaving his
fine position to become the executive
assistant" to the head of a great cor
poration, at one Of those fabulous sal.
aries one hears of but most of us never
get. And what a drama that was,
when this old locomotive fireman first
shook hands with his old "boss," the
engineer of his train of so long ago!
Until many years have gone by, no
one, not even the experts" will be
able to tell whether their classified
tions" of children, according to their
snappy intelligence tests, were correct
or not. And in the meantime we pro-
test against the use of children in
such laboratory experimenting. The
human spirit is too sacred a thing to
be subjected to a dabbling process in
the name Of education. (No, we don't
believe in universal fingerprints,
either)