Who is cyril burt

Why on earth do we still have the plus? An education system, which splits children up when they are so young and brands three-quarters of them as failures should have no place in a civilised society. Yet it still persists. Each year thousands of children in England take the plus or its equivalent. The sorry tale of how we got into this miserable mess should be better known. It concerns an educational psychologist who was too arrogant to admit that he might be wrong.

His name was Cyril Burt and, during the last century, he was recognised as the major British authority on the intelligence of children. Burt believed that intelligence was innate. Early in his career, in , he noticed that upper-class children in private preparatory schools did better in IQ tests than children in ordinary elementary schools.

His conclusion, which now seems laughable, was that the difference had little to do with a privileged upbringing, a better-resourced school or diligent coaching.

Burt believed that rich children scored better than poor children because intelligence was inherited and those rich children in private schools had cleverer parents than the poorer children in the elementary schools.

He strived to prove this theory by studying identical twins who had been separated at birth and brought up in different conditions. In a series of much-quoted articles he reported that external circumstances were irrelevant. Even after living apart, identical twins scored the same as each other in IQ tests. Burt insisted that this inherited intelligence was fixed and unchangeable.

An IQ test taken early in life would reveal which children were bright and which were less intelligent. In fact a cavalier disregard for the facts seems to have been characteristic of Burt's work long before he descended into outright fraud. In his very first study in which looked at intelligence and social class, he concluded that it made very little difference whether children were born in a slum or a leafy suburb--intelligence was largely inherited.

In support of this, he claimed that the IQs of fathers and sons were very similar, but provided no parental test scores. When questioned 50 years later about how he had measure parental intelligence, it emerged that Burt hadn't--he had merely assumed it from their social standing! It is hard to imagine a more circular reasoning. Yet soon after this Burt was made the official psychologist of the London County Council, responsible for the administration and interpretation of mental tests in London's schools.

The fact that further damning evidence against Burt can emerge from a book whose contributors all seem fairly sympathetic to his general views deals a significant blow to current attempts to rehabilitate him.

However, it also limits the usefulness of this book for those seeking to challenge the whole notion that intelligence is largely genetic. A claim made repeatedly in this book, even by those contributors who are most critical of Burt, is that the conclusions he reached about the hereditability of intelligence retain their validity despite his exposure as a fraudster.

In support of such a claim it is said that there are many studies other than Burt's which support the idea that intelligence is inherited. Yet the credibility of such studies has already been destroyed by critics like Kamin, not on the grounds of fraud, but because they do not stand up to serious scientific scrutiny.

One of the reasons that Burt's study was so often quoted was because it claimed no similarity between the social circumstances of the families that raised separated twins. In contrast, in the two other early studies of this kind, it has become apparent that twins supposedly separated at birth were not raised apart at all. They were raised by members of the same extended family, in the same village. They played together and went to school together. Other adoption studies of IQ which are said to demonstrate the effect of genes have their own experimental difficulties, including the failure to match children by age, extremely small sample size, and biased selection for study.

It is claimed in this book that the most recent study meets many of the criticisms levelled at previous work. Yet although its investigators claimed the twins they studied had grown up entirely separately, they had previously reported that twins apparently separated at birth wore the same number of rings on their fingers, called their dogs by the same names and married women with the same names, which would imply some social interaction between the twins at some point in their lives--unless the authors are seriously suggesting there is a hereditary gene for naming your dog.

If IQ studies are flawed in their scientific method, a much more fundamental flaw is the basic assumption that inspires them. This is the notion that intelligence is a natural attribute, a fixed quantity, marginally affected by the social environment but essentially unchangeable. In fact such a view is rejected nowadays by most serious psychologists. Most scientists studying the way human minds work now agree that intelligence and human thought processes are multi-faceted and complex phenomena.

It has been demonstrated that there is no automatic connection between ability in one area and another. And undermining the IQ testers' claims to measure general intelligence, recent research shows that children can easily be trained in the skills needed to score high marks. Of course it would be madness to say there is no such thing as natural ability.

Within five years of his death, however, he was being publicly denounced as a fraud who had fabricated data purporting to show that human intelligence is inherited. Was he really a fraud? Or was he accused of fraud by critics anxious to dismiss such a politically unacceptable scientific theory?

Where does the truth lie? The chapters to this book examine the evidence carefully and dispassionately and conclude that both the defence and the prosecution cases are seriously flawed. This is a rea This is a reanalysis of the data, which has turned up new instances of potential fraud, which were not evident before. This book provides an unbiased analysis of one of the most notorious scandals in science. Keywords: Cyril Burt , educational psychologist , fraud , fabricated data , inherited intelligence.

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