Alfred Binet got no fame for his attempt to create a ‘scientific pedagogy’ but for his success in elaborating mental tests to measure intelligence. His scientific pedagogy sank into oblivion, while his name became well-known for mental tests that were flexible enough to be adapted to a strongly different educational context, as were the US in 1909. Yet, scientific pedagogy was a very purpose of its researches, whereas his mental tests were only for him a tool of assessment, an appropriate mean to improve teaching. Binet’s pedagogy and mental tests were the two faces of one single idea, namely that pedagogical techniques had to be derived from the psychological structure of pupils' minds, and certainly not from the – questionable – ‘proper order’ of academic knowledge. Underlining the main features of Binet’s scientific pedagogy will enable us to show that mental tests were not harmless acute and “scientific” tools used to improve classical ways of assessment: they strongly modified the subject as well as the object of the assessment and also the meaning of these assessments. As used within the tests, academic knowledge appears no longer as an aim in itself but as a convenient tool used by psychologists to introduce a sharp classification of pupils according to their abilities. In this attempt of substituting a psychometric-based assessment to an academic and traditional one, Alfred Binet performed a dramatic transformation in the field of pedagogical ideas. By inverting the order of subordination between pupils and knowledge, namely by asserting that knowledge transmission should be organised to be adapted to pupils’ own rhythm of learning and not to the opposite, Binet broke the traditional conception of knowledge seen as a self-ordered entity according to which pupils had to be shaped. In this view, pedagogy is no longer a matter of walking with the pupil along the path of knowledge as a master who knows the path and the ordeals that the pupil will have to face to reach this knowledge, but pedagogy is now a matter of ordering the steps of knowledge transmission according to the children’s developmental steps, as measured by the mental tests of intelligence. Along such a reshaping of pedagogical practices and meanings, teacher’s training is no longer a matter of mastering academic knowledge but rather a matter of getting expertise in child psychology and educational sciences. We will show that Binet’s scientific pedagogy had heralded the modern pedagogical theories that deny any substance or value in itself to academic knowledge, and that promote a conception of knowledge as a cultural entity whose relevance as an object of learning has to be submitted to discussion: Behind the competition between psychologists and schoolteachers to control pupils’ assessment, we will see that it was the emergence of new pedagogies and constructivist learning theories that was at stake.

Historiography and epistemological analysis mains sources: Binet's publications

Contribution to the History of the Relationship Between Pedagogy and Assessment