11. ‘A Violation of the Child’s Integrity and of Parental Rights’

This chapter analyses a controversy that broke out in 1959 on mandatory IQ testing of first graders in Oslo’s primary schools. After a critical radio talk followed by a series of letters and op-eds in the press, the issue was brought up in Parliament where it became subject to lively debate. The core of the criticism was that testing violated the child’s integrity and parental rights, since parents were neither informed about their child being tested nor of the result. This argument would reappear in two later parliamentary debates in the early 1960s on research projects using schoolchildren as subjects. Interestingly, criticism came predominantly from the center-right, contrary to the pattern in the United States in the 1960s, where resistance against the use of intelligence assessments in schools was a leftist cause. The chapter argues that the controversy could be read as a symptom of the limits of welfare-state consensus and trust in public authorities, which is often believed to have been at an all-time high level in Norway in the 1950s, and points to some possible explanations why IQ testing of schoolchildren became such a highly contentious issue.