was nonsense. Alfred Binet, in 1905, published the first scale for measuring intelligence. During the 1920s, children began to be given IQ (intelligence quotient) and achievement tests on a wide scale and sometimes were carefully grouped by ability and intelligence. Many of the spelling and reading books they used, foreshadowing the 1931 Dick and Jane readers, were based on "controlled" vocabularies. After the shock Americans felt when the Soviets launched the first space satellite (Sputnik) in 1957, criticism of the schools swelled into loud demands for renewed emphasis on content mastery. The insistence on cognitive "performance" and "excellence" accomplished four things. It increased competitive academic pressures on students at all levels. It stimulated serious and sustained interest in preschool education, which manifested itself in various ways from the revival of the Montessori method in the 1960s to the preschool television series Sesame Street in 1969. In addition, it created a new interest in testing, this time in such forms as national assessments of student performance, experiments with programmed materials, and attempts to gauge when children could begin to read. And it stimulated interest in the application of technology and instructional systems to education as a means of improving student instruction. It was practical to open up new avenues of education... the United States was in competition with the Soviet Union. The Space Race was well on its way and America needed to change the way they learned. And practicality was the key. From the 18th century onward, as knowledge of the world increased, new subjects had been added and old ones split up into branches. Later, new combinations of courses resulted from the attempt to put the scattered pieces of knowledge back together again. The purpose was to make knowledge more rational and meaningful so that it could be understood instead of mechanically memorized. It also encour...
