Teacher, Tester, Soldier, Spy: Teachers in the research on intelligence, 1910s-1930s.

Teachers occupied an ambiguous space in both the discourses and the practices of early 20th-century proponents of intelligence-testing. They were both a targeted enemy - their methods ridiculed, their unreliability emphasised - and the foot soldiers of the intelligence-testing movement: only by gaining their support could university psychologists ensure that tests would be administered on large scales to children. But by training teachers to give tests, psychologists were putting themselves in a precarious position: how could they retain control of their own expertise? And what would teachers do with the knowledge they were given? In this talk I map and analyse the ally-adversary status of teachers and their fraught relations to psychologists in this era.