The Journal of Delinquency, 1920, Vol. 5 (Classic Reprint) - Tapa dura

Excerpt from The Journal of Delinquency, 1920, Vol. 5

Associate Psycho Clinician at the State Bureau of Juvenile Research Columbus, Ohio.

The term moron as a name for the highest grade of feeble-mind edness is so well known that it was recently stated on the editorial page of a local newspaper that the well informed person must use the word occasionally to show that he is keeping up with the times. For years men who have been dealing with social problems have real ized that it is the moron who makes necessary a large part of their work. Just what a moron is and what should be done with him has not been until recently a difficult question to answer. Any student of social psychology will tell you very glibly that a moron is a high grade feeble-minded person with a mental age of eight to eleven years and that he should be segregated for life in an institution. This sounds simple indeed and if it were entirely true the problem would not be as complicated as it really is.

The psychologists in the army, however, have upset us completely in our thinking and we no longer feel at all confident of the sound ness of our theories as to what a moron is nor as to how organized society is to treat him. Let us see just What these army psycholog ista have discovered to upset our pre-conceived notions regarding the moron so that we in great confusion ask. When is a moron not a moron? Or When is a moron not feeble-minded In the first place they have determined for the first time in the history of mental testing intelligence levels of thousands of adults representing prob ably a fair sample of the general population of the country. The results of their tests give startling facts regarding the distribution of general intelligence. The curve of distribution in Fig. 1 shows roughly the distribution of the ratings of men in the United States Army by letter grade from A to E with C taken as the average. This is interesting as showing that the distribution of general intelli gence follows the normal curve of distribution with a slight skewing at the lower end of the curve. This skewing is probably due to the fact that a great many individuals have a lower grade of general intelligence than they would have possessed from purely hereditary causes.

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