Popenoe: Intelligence and Schooling 



191 



grade, and about one-fourth finish the 

 eighth." 



Standards of sdioohng vary in dif- 

 ferent parts of the country so that, for 

 example, the attainment of third grade 

 in a rural negro school may not repre- 

 sent the same amount of accomplish- 

 ment that it does in a white urban 

 school. But such differences cannot 

 be regarded as great enough to account 

 for the large discrepancies in intelli- 

 gence shown. 



When the distributions of intelli- 

 gence revealed by the army mental 

 tests are compared with the schooling 

 distributions for the same groups, "the 

 following observation may be made: 

 The better educated the group, the 

 better is its record on the intelligence 

 examinations; or, equally truly, the 

 better the intelligence rating a group 

 can make, the more education it has 

 obtained. The only point on which 

 this correspondence fails is that the 

 northern negro draft group is better 

 schooled though less intelligent than 

 the foreign-born draft group; it is 

 just in line with this discrepanc}^ too, 

 that the southern negro group, lowest 

 in each comparison, is nevertheless 

 much farther removed from the others 

 in intelligence rating than it is in school- 

 ing. The normal relation between the 

 intelligence of a race and its interest in 

 the training of its youth, one might 

 say, has been upset by contact with a 

 highly educated civilization, which 

 has enormously increased the time the 



negro spends on education without 

 correspondingly increasing his intelli- 

 gence (as measured by these examina- 

 tions). The position of army officers 

 in the two comparisons also falls in line 

 here; in each respect it holds the high- 

 est position, but is much farther sepa- 

 rated from the other groups in schooling 

 than it is in intelligence. This greatly 

 increased education, in other words, is 

 not accompanied by an equal increase 

 in the intelligence rating; in the latter 

 the distributions for officers and 

 white draft still overlap appreciably, 

 while schooling separates them quite 

 sharply." 



One crucial test of the independence 

 of schooling and intelligence rating is 

 to compare various groups which have 

 the same amount of schooling — tech- 

 nically, to make this factor constant 

 while measuring the variation of the 

 other. The median scores in the 

 alpha test, for groups which reported 

 only four years of Grammar school 

 training, are given in table I. 



It will be noted that at this level of 

 schooling, the foreign-born whites 

 slightly surpass the natives. This 

 difference, which disappears at higher 

 levels of schooling, may be due to 

 greater pressure in native American 

 communities to continue in school; in 

 part to better opportunities of school- 

 ing; moreover, native-born children 

 who drop out of school at this stage 

 are likely to do so in many cases be- 

 cause of inferior intelligence, whereas 



Table I. Median Alpha Scores for Groups Which Reported 4 Years of Grammar School Training 



No. of cases. . 

 Median score. 



White draft, 

 native born 



2773 

 23.4 



White draft, 

 foreign born 



355 

 26.6 



Negro draft, 

 northern 



312 

 19.8 



Negro draft, 

 southern 



356 

 8.4 



Table II. Median Scores for Groups Which Reported Eighth-Grade Schooling 



Number of cases . 

 Median score. . . 



White 

 officers 



448 

 108.1 



White draft, 

 native born 



14,899 

 64.4 



White draft, 

 foreign- born 



928 

 59.4 



Negro draft, 

 northern 



555 

 50.0 



Negro draft, 

 southern 



144 

 28.9 



