Despite growing interest in the field of medical history, little emphasis has been placed on how expert-led measurements of children's intellectual development played out in state socialist societies. To gain more insight into how the biosocial development of children met the objectives of the socialist state, this paper focuses on the practice of Hungarian psychologists who used supposedly objective IQ tests on children in the 1970s and, in doing so, also addressed the interests of experts in other disciplines.
The paper explores how the use of internationally established tests from the 1970s onwards marked a distinct societal shift: whereas the beginnings of socialism were characterised by Communist Party efforts to overcome earlier class divisions through a quota system favouring students of workers' and peasants' origin, measuring certain aspects of intelligence in quantifiable terms pointed to a de-ideologisation of the system. I analyse how supposedly neutral and objective techniques re-inscribed differences stemming from the socio-economic backgrounds of the test subjects.
My paper draws on various sources, including medical discourse in specialised journals, archival material documenting the Party’s position in exchange with experts, and the discourse presented to the broader public in popular publications. Ultimately, this paper seeks to shed light on how these techniques and their results were used to nurture the intellectual development of the socialist child. In doing so, it illustrates how objective measurements reflected the importance of socio-economic background — or, put differently, how they silently reintroduced class-based differentiation into medical discourse.