Copyright

Jon Røyne Kyllingstad; Håkon Aamot Caspersen

Published On

2026-03-02

Page Range

pp. 443–458

Language

  • English

Print Length

16 pages

14. IQ Testing, Education, Reification, and “Race” in Norway’s Social Democratic Welfare State

  • Jon Røyne Kyllingstad (author)
  • Håkon Aamot Caspersen (author)
Chapter of: Historicizing IQ Testing: Intelligence Assessments and their Role in Norwegian Society from the 1900s to the Present(pp. 443–458)
This chapter discuss a few examples of emerging and more overarching perspectives on the Norwegian history of IQ testing that appear throughout the book. The comparative observations focusing on the Norwegian educational system and its connection to the social democratic welfare state, introduced by Jim Porter in the previous chapter, serves as a starting point. Specifically, this includes a discussion of reification and the pragmatic aspect of testing, as well as the relative absence of explicit discussions on “race” when it comes to testing in Norway.

Contributors

Jon Røyne Kyllingstad

(author)
Associate professor and Research project leader at University of Oslo

Jon Røyne Kyllingstad is a historian and associate professor at the University of Oslo, Museum of University History/Museum of Cultural History, where he is the leader of the research project Historicizing Intelligence, which this book is based upon. He is a specialist in the history of science and the history of academic institutions with a focus on Norway. He was previously head conservator at the Norwegian Museum of Technology. His last book Rase: en vitenskapshistorie [Race: a history of a science] sums up two decades of work on changing ideas about race, ethnicity and the nation, within physical anthropology, genetics, and humanities disciplines such as archaeology and history in Norway. Similar topics were also addressed in Measuring the Master Race, published by Open Book Publishers in 2014.

Håkon Aamot Caspersen

(author)
Postdoctoral research fellow; at University of Oslo

Håkon Caspersen is a social anthropologist with a PhD from the University of St Andrews and currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the project Historicizing Intelligence at the Museum of University History/Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo.