ABSTRACT
As we have seen in chapter two, for the British and American IQ testers, intelligence was a matter of winners and losers. It was their genetic inheritance that kept the privileged in the lead, and the poor were expected to lag behind. For Burt ‘It should be an essential part of the child’s education to teach him how to face a possible beating on the 11+ (or any other examination), just as he should learn to take a beating in a half-mile race, or in a bout with boxing gloves, or a football match with a rival school’ (1959, p. 123). All this from a man who was in training from an early age, as his father taught him Latin declensions ‘morning by morning while still in my cot’.1
