1921 - Mental and Scholastic Tests (Cyril Burt)

Cyril Burt was an English psychologist working on tests and intelligence. In this book, imagination as a classification that makes up a certain kind of child is explored. Referring to the results from Binet-Simon tests, he traces a psychological profile of a boy said to be 'taciturn.'
"The boy illustrates emotional instability in an opposite form. He is of the repressed or sensitive variety rather than of the excitable or unrepressed. He is described by his teacher as 'slow and sleepy.' It would be perhaps truer to call him 'slow and sure.' When his attention wanders, he is not asleep; he is dreaming, giving full flight to a somewhat precocious imagination. In arithmetic, he is very poor. He reads voraciously, and spells execrable. But his compositions sparkle, even where they do not shine. There is many a quiet child with a touch of this whimsical temperament. Shy, timid, uncommunicative, yet on acquaintance most engaging, they can be brought to show their finer qualities only through patient sympathy and personal interest. In a large class, they usually remain incompris - a little mysterious and very much misconstrued. Just because they are pensive and visionary within, they seem outwardly aloof and unobservant. Soaring in fantasy, they see no facts. They are like those celestial beings whom the Scriptures represent as veiling their eyes with their wings."
This boy is presented in contrast to a girl that is "glib and plausible - indeed her conversational gifts have earned to her in the Binet-Simon tests an estimate her general powers hardly warrant. [...] the teacher says: 'She answers up well enough, but is disappointing. She has no power of concentration, and, without being lazy, she does not work.' Manifestly she belongs to that perplexing type which elsewhere I have tried to portray in detail - the unstable child."
These discourses are being produced within psychology. They cross and melt with educational discourses. Gender differentiations are being produced in them. The boy is described as imaginative, and the girl as unstable. The imaginative girl, or the wilful girl that does not correspond with the script of what it should be to be a girl, is classified as disruptive. Even when 'shy', the imaginative boy is described as a 'celestial being'.

CM