Since 1930, when intelligence testing was first formally introduced in the Danish public school system, it gradually came to function as the key technology for a streaming practice of determining which children should stay in the ‘normal school’ [normalskolen] and which children should be transferred to ‘remedial education’ [værneskolen]. In other words, IQ testing served as a key marker for understanding disability and for regulating problematized bodies in the Danish public school system.
In the 1940s Danish educational psychologists began to change their concept of intelligence from being seen as something innate and fixed to a concept of intelligence that stipulated intelligence development as something dynamic and subject to environmental factors. This development can be traced when comparing the revision of the Danish Binet-Simon intelligence test published in 1943 with the original test published and standardised in 1930. This change had significant impact on the development of intelligence testing practices in Denmark and it raises critical awareness that any testing practice rests on certain preconditions and understandings that are subject to historical change.
The paper throws light on the national and international spaces of the leading agents, the historical context characterised by the struggle between fascist and democratic ideas and the German occupation of Denmark in 1940 as well as the relevant knowledge regimes revealing a slide from a positivistic to a constructivist paradigm. Thus, the research questions treated can be summed up as how the change in the concept of intelligence between the publication of the first Danish standardisation of the Binet-Simon intelligence test in 1930 and the revision in 1943 can be adequately understood? How did it influence the understanding of the children’s disabilities? And what experiences can be drawn from this development with contemporary relevance for the on-going debates about the role of science in education?
This paper draws on historical documents and publications, unpublished sources from the city archives of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg and existing research in the field.