Lewis Terman

Based on Wikipedia: Lewis Terman

In 2018, parents in Palo Alto, California, discovered something troubling about the man their children's school was named after. Lewis Terman, the psychologist who had revolutionized intelligence testing in America, had also been a leading figure in the eugenics movement—advocating for the forced sterilization of people he deemed genetically inferior. The school board voted unanimously to remove his name.

This is the paradox of Lewis Terman. He created tools that helped identify gifted children and gave them opportunities they might otherwise have missed. He also used those same tools to argue that entire races were intellectually inferior and should be prevented from reproducing. Understanding how one man could hold both positions tells us something important about the history of psychology—and about how scientific authority can be wielded for both good and terrible ends.

The Farm Boy Who Measured Minds

Terman was born in 1877 in rural Indiana, the son of a farmer. Nothing in his background suggested he would become one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. By his own admission, there was nothing in his ancestry that would have led anyone to predict an intellectual career for him.

Yet he was clearly bright. He collected degrees the way some people collect stamps—a Bachelor of Science, a Bachelor of Pedagogy, and a Bachelor of Arts from Central Normal College by 1898, then another bachelor's and a master's from Indiana University, and finally a doctorate from Clark University in 1905. His doctoral dissertation had a blunt title that revealed his lifelong preoccupation: "Genius and Stupidity: A Study of Some of the Intellectual Processes of Seven 'Bright' and Seven 'Stupid' Boys."

After a brief stint as a school principal in San Bernardino and a professorship in Los Angeles, Terman joined Stanford University in 1910. He would remain there until his death in 1956, eventually becoming chairman of the psychology department for over two decades.

His son Frederick would later become known as "the father of Silicon Valley," helping transform Stanford into a world-class engineering institution and nurturing the technology companies that would reshape the world. The Terman name once adorned both a middle school and an endowed professorship at Stanford—though only the latter remains.

Inventing the IQ Test

To understand what Terman accomplished, you need to know about Alfred Binet. This French psychologist had developed a test in the early 1900s to identify children who needed extra help in school. Binet's goal was humanitarian—he wanted to find struggling students so teachers could give them the support they needed.

Terman took Binet's test and transformed it into something different. In 1916, he published the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test, which became known simply as the Stanford-Binet. This wasn't just a translation; it was a reimagining.

The key innovation was the Intelligence Quotient, or IQ. Terman adopted an idea from German psychologist William Stern: take a person's mental age (how they performed compared to average children of different ages), divide it by their chronological age, and multiply by one hundred. A ten-year-old who performed like an average twelve-year-old would have an IQ of 120. A ten-year-old who performed like an average eight-year-old would have an IQ of 80.

This single number—the IQ score—would become one of the most influential and controversial metrics in the history of psychology.

While Binet saw his test as a diagnostic tool to help struggling children, Terman saw something grander. He believed IQ was largely inherited and was "the strongest predictor of one's ultimate success in life." He proposed using the tests not to help children, but to sort them—to put them on different tracks for different futures.

Testing an Army

World War One gave Terman his opportunity to prove that intelligence testing could work at scale. The United States military needed to sort 1.7 million recruits quickly. Who should become officers? Who should be assigned to different roles? Terman and his colleagues stepped in with a solution.

They developed two group tests that could be administered in about an hour. The Army Alpha was a written test for literate recruits. The Army Beta used pictures instead of words for those who couldn't read. A quarter of the recruits couldn't complete the Alpha test—a reflection of the era's educational inequalities.

Examiners scored recruits on a scale from A to E. Those who earned an A would be trained as officers. Those who earned a D or E would never receive officer training, regardless of their other qualities.

The military testing proved something important to Americans: intelligence tests could be administered quickly to large numbers of people and used to make practical decisions. After the war, Terman and his colleagues pushed to bring these tests into schools across the country, promising they would improve the efficiency of the growing American educational system.

What they didn't emphasize was how much the tests reflected educational opportunity rather than innate ability. A person who had never learned to read would inevitably score lower, regardless of their underlying intelligence.

The Termites

Terman's most famous project began in 1921: a long-term study of gifted children that would continue for decades after his death. He called it the Genetic Studies of Genius, and the children he studied became known, somewhat affectionately, as "Termites."

The study was groundbreaking in its ambition. Previously, researchers had studied genius retrospectively—looking back at the childhoods of famous adults to find clues about how talent develops. Terman flipped this approach. He identified children with extremely high IQs while they were young and followed them throughout their lives.

His goals were twofold. First, he wanted to discover the best educational settings for gifted children. Second, he wanted to test and dispel negative stereotypes about smart kids. People assumed that intellectually gifted children were "conceited, freakish, socially eccentric," and prone to mental instability. Were they right?

The data said no.

Terman found that his gifted children were, on average, in better health than their peers. They were taller and better developed physically. They were better adapted socially. Far from being sickly misfits, they thrived.

As the Termites grew into adults, Terman tracked their careers and relationships. Many achieved remarkable success. They won awards and recognition in their fields. They were less likely to divorce than the general population. The study seemed to validate the importance of identifying and nurturing exceptional children.

But not all the Termites flourished. Terman was honest enough to explore why some of his high-IQ children failed to achieve obvious success. He identified personal obstacles, educational failures, and lack of opportunity as causes. This was a subtle acknowledgment that intelligence alone wasn't enough—that environment mattered too.

The Genetic Studies of Genius was published in five volumes. Terman died before completing the fifth, but his colleague Melita Oden finished it for him. He selected Robert Richardson Sears—himself a Termite who had become a colleague—to continue the work after his death. The study continued at Stanford, following the remaining Termites until they withdrew or died.

Nature and Nurture

Terman held a complicated position on the question of nature versus nurture—complicated because his stated beliefs didn't always match his actions.

He insisted that intelligence was largely inherited. In his view, IQ was primarily determined by genetics, passed down through family lines like eye color or height. This belief led him to troubling conclusions about race and class.

Yet he also recognized that even the brightest children needed proper education to thrive. In a 1915 paper called "The Mental Hygiene of Exceptional Children," he wrote that gifted students "are rarely given tasks which call forth their best ability, and as a result they run the risk of falling into lifelong habits of submaximum efficiency."

In other words: even if nature gives you intellectual potential, nurture determines whether you reach it.

This wasn't just theoretical for Terman. His own life was evidence. Nothing in his rural Indiana background predicted an academic career. Whatever innate abilities he possessed, he needed educational opportunities to develop them. Yet he seemed unable or unwilling to extend this logic to others.

The Dark Side

Here is where Terman's story becomes deeply troubling.

He was a prominent member of the American eugenics movement—not a passive supporter, but an active leader. He belonged to the Human Betterment Foundation, the American Eugenics Society, and the Eugenics Research Association. His name appeared in the Eugenical News alongside other prominent psychologists like G. Stanley Hall and John B. Watson.

Eugenics—the term means "well-born" in Greek—was the belief that humanity could be improved through selective breeding. In its mild forms, it meant encouraging "fit" people to have more children. In its extreme forms, it meant preventing "unfit" people from reproducing at all, through forced sterilization.

Terman embraced the extreme form.

When he administered his intelligence tests to Spanish-speaking and Black populations in the Southwest, he concluded that their low scores reflected innate racial inferiority rather than educational disadvantage. His words are worth quoting directly, because they reveal how scientific language can be used to dress up prejudice:

High-grade or border-line deficiency is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come. Children of this group should be segregated into separate classes. They cannot master abstractions but they can often be made into efficient workers. From a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.

Read that again. A man who built his career measuring intelligence declared that entire ethnic groups were intellectually inferior and should be segregated. He described their having children as a "grave problem."

He made similar claims about Italian, Portuguese, and Mexican schoolchildren in California, estimating their median IQ at around 80. While he acknowledged that "language handicap and other environmental factors" might play some role, he concluded that "the true causes lie deeper than environment."

These weren't just academic musings. Terman joined the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena organization founded in 1928 that promoted forced sterilization laws in California. These laws resulted in the sterilization of thousands of people deemed "unfit"—a polite word for a violent act performed without meaningful consent on those who couldn't protect themselves.

Modern historians have documented the damage done. People were identified by eugenicists like Terman as genetically defective and subjected to permanent medical procedures against their will. This wasn't Nazi Germany. This was California.

A Man of His Time?

How should we understand Terman today?

One recent assessment tried to thread the needle: "Lewis Terman was a man of his less-than-enlightened time. He believed in eugenics, and his research project was called 'Genetic Studies of Genius.' He naively assumed that his high IQ kids (nearly all white) would become the future leaders of science, industry, and politics."

The assessment continued: "However, Terman was above all a scientist; and he was dedicated to collecting meaningful data, and to accepting what the data showed even when it contradicted his beliefs."

This is generous, perhaps too generous. It's true that Terman's studies of gifted children produced genuinely valuable data and challenged some stereotypes. It's true that he included girls in his study at a time when women had just gained the right to vote and had few career options.

But "man of his time" explanations only go so far. Other people in Terman's era recognized that eugenics was morally wrong. Other scientists criticized the racist interpretations of intelligence data. Terman wasn't simply reflecting his era's views—he was actively promoting them, lending his scientific authority to policies that caused real harm to real people.

His work, along with that of other eugenicist educators like Edward Thorndike and H.H. Goddard, contributed to decades of racial school segregation in America. The scientific veneer he gave to racist ideas made them harder to challenge.

Legacy

The Stanford-Binet intelligence test remains in use today, now in its fifth revision. It measures something—whether we should call that something "intelligence" is still debated. Modern versions have moved away from the simple mental age divided by chronological age formula, adopting more sophisticated statistical approaches.

The Genetic Studies of Genius demonstrated that high-IQ children could be healthy, well-adjusted, and successful. This helped create programs for gifted education across America. Whether those programs have been net positive—or whether they've simply reinforced existing privileges—is still debated.

The Human Betterment Foundation was dissolved in 1942. Forced sterilization continued in California until 1979.

Terman died in 1956, honored with membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. A 2002 survey ranked him as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.

The middle school that bore his name for over sixty years is now called Fletcher Middle School, named after a former city councilwoman who advocated for bicycle lanes. When parents learned about Terman's eugenics work in 2018, they were horrified. The school board's unanimous vote to remove his name reflected a community grappling with how to acknowledge complicated legacies.

Perhaps that's the lesson of Lewis Terman. Intelligence testing isn't inherently good or evil—it's a tool that can be used for either purpose. Binet used it to help struggling children. Terman used it to sort children into tracks and to argue that some races were genetically inferior. The same data, the same methods, deployed in service of radically different visions of human equality.

We like to think that science is objective, that data speaks for itself. Terman's career shows how thoroughly prejudice can shape the questions we ask, the conclusions we draw, and the policies we advocate—even when we believe we're being purely scientific.

His son Frederick helped create Silicon Valley, a place that prizes intelligence and achievement above almost everything else. The meritocratic ideology of the tech industry—the belief that smart people rise to the top and deserve their success—has roots in the intelligence testing movement that Lewis Terman championed. Whether that ideology is a legacy to celebrate or to question is a choice we're still making.