"I believe that if the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, there is a future country where they do things differently and better."
Goodey, C. F. (2012). A #History of Intelligence and « Intellectual #Disability ». The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Damn.
"The student, having stumbled across psychology by being “interested in people,” [...] must at some point face the fact that her chosen profession is not interested in people in any way she may have so far thought of them, but only as parts and props of a vulnerable institutional order which she herself will help to police and of which intelligence is the supreme membership criterion. At this point psychology’s enchanted forest will either swallow her up, or she will come to ask about its idea of people, in W.H. Auden’s words, “Was it to meet such grinning evidence / We left our richly odoured ignorance?"
(same source as above)
Damn².
"“Intellectual disability” is the reserve tank into which anyone who needs a justification for other, supposedly more arguable discriminations, can dip momentarily, an insurance policy guaranteeing that some of the normal population are more intelligent than others: that is, both individually (I more than you, my child more than yours) and in groups (men more than women, whites more than blacks, self-improvers more than the underclass). A society that congratulates itself on celebrating diversity must understand that signing up to an intelligence hierarchy among individuals necessarily entails, in the small print, signing up to and keeping on the back-burner an intelligence hierarchy among ethnic, gendered and class-based groups."
(source : see first toot)
Claire Boilley