hat logic and reason are not value neutral, they are concepts which are steeped in a particular ideology. What it also inadvertently points to the idea of interpreting intelligence from completely opposite perspectives. Thinking in terms of cycles instead of our linear modes of thoughts produces completely different types or patterns of intelligence. It serves as a caution in trying to determine and define the very slippery notion of intelligence. Intelligence defined The inherent difficulty in studying intelligence is reflected one of psychology’s maxims; ‘the human mind’s greatest challenge is to understand itself’. This has nonetheless not deterred psychologists in attempting to measure this ambiguous concept. The first to propose and design an intelligence test was Alfred Binet. He was summoned by the French government to design a test that would be able to alert educators of children who might benefit from remedial instruction. The test was so successful in determining school performance that it was accepted throughout the western world. In 1916 Lewis Terman from Standford University adapted it for use with American children. It thus became the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test and is the test most commonly referred to when speaking of an IQ test. This test and others like it take a holistic approach to intelligence. They point to the idea of intelligence as a unified trait. This idea was expanded in 1927 by Spearman who noticed that all the items on the Stanford-Binet test were correlated and thus proposed a general factor, which he termed ‘g’, of intelligence. He viewed the different items as measuring specific factors he termed ‘s’. The concept that intelligence can be viewed as a singular trait is one that has lost its appeal over the years. In an article published by the Progressive Labor Party ‘Racism, Intelligence and the Working Class’, the authors bring some of the...
