Alfred Binet · 1909
Modern Ideas About Children
- Original title
- Les idées modernes sur les enfants
- Language
- French
- Form
- Treatise
- Text
- Full text
- English
- No English translation · English translation Modern Ideas About Children (1975); not public domain.
- Source text
- archive.org
- Selected
- Ben Breen, 2026-09-29; suggested by Claude research agents, 29 Sep 2026
- Status
- Arguments unverified; quotations chosen by machine, unchecked
Q12JUDGMENT
Can numerical measures adequately determine a person's fitness for a position of responsibility?Qualified. measure but do not fix. Binet argues that distraction, discomfort or boredom can cause failure on a test, making measurement of a child’s intelligence from very few tests absurd. This is a qualification of testing, not a rejection of all tests.
Supposons que le sujet ait un moment de distraction, de gêne, d'ennui pendant une épreuve : le voilà qui échoue. On ne peut pas douter de la justesse de cette dernière raison. Nous en sommes pénétrés à ce point que nous jugeons chimérique et absurde de mesurer une intelligence d'enfant d'après un très petit nombre d'épreuves.
Suppose the subject has a moment of distraction, discomfort or boredom during a test: there he is, failing. One cannot doubt the soundness of this last reason. We are so convinced of it that we judge it fanciful and absurd to measure a child's intelligence from a very small number of tests.
OCR correctedmachine translation
Paris: Flammarion 1909; Gallica and Internet Archive records in search results. Argument summary from general knowledge of the book; no chapter confirmed.