La mesure fait loi. La doctrine de l'hygiène mentale et les tests psychométriques au Québec pendant l'entre-deux-guerres
Bibliographic record
Abstract
S'inscrivant en anthropologie historique et en histoire de la culture politique, cet article veut analyser, parmi les processus de légitimation de la doctrine de l'hygiène mentale, celui de l'implantation des tests psychométriques appliqués aux écoliers du Québec de l'entre-deux-guerres. Promus auprès de certains responsables politiques par des experts cherchant à imposer leurs propres classifications comme grille de saisie de la réalité, ces tests reflètent la prégnance de la pensée scientifique dans la société québécoise de l'époque, une pensée qui s'infiltre non seulement dans le champ médical, mais aussi dans ceux de l'éducation et du politique. L'argumentation porte d'abord sur la légitimité des tests psychométriques, puis sur les opérations de dépistage systématique des anomalies intellectuelles qu'ils permettent et, enfin, sur une solution avancée par les promoteurs de l'hygiène mentale, celle de la ségrégation des élèves et de l'instauration de classes spéciales destinées aux cas anormaux. Ici, l'étude de ces tests soulève trois interrogations dans le domaine de l'histoire culturelle : celles de la légitimité variable d'une pratique scientifique, des rapports entre acteurs sociaux agissant dans des champs différents ainsi que des relations entre nature et culture. The article uses historical anthropology and political cultural history to analyse the application of psychometric tests on Quebec schoolchildren between the two world wars. These tests were used to justify the mental health doctrine of the time. Psychometric tests were promoted to a number of politicians by experts wishing to impose their own ranking system on schoolchildren as a comprehensive scientific process. Psychometric tests represented the entrenchment of scientific thought in contemporary Quebec society. Scientific thought came to influence not only the medical field but also the educational and political realms. The article focuses on the establishment of psychometric tests as legitimate, the routine identification of intellectual differences that these tests made possible, and, finally, the solution offered by mental hygiene experts – the segregation of 'abnormal' students and the creation of special classes for them. The study of these tests reveals three themes in cultural history: the changing legitimacy of scientific practice, the interaction of social actors working in different fields, and the relationship between nature and culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".