# A Future for the Tests **Status: stub.** Article 6 of six in [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]], published in *The New Republic* on 29 November 1922. The constructive close, and the reason the series is a critique of hereditarianism rather than of testing as such. [[Walter Lippmann]] argues that mental testing has a legitimate future — as a diagnostic aid, a tool for identifying children who need help and for studying how capacities actually develop — but only once it abandons the claim to be measuring predetermined hereditary intelligence. Stripped of that claim, a test is a modest instrument with modest uses. Freighted with it, it becomes a machine for manufacturing caste. The essay makes explicit that Lippmann's quarrel was with a metaphysical claim smuggled in alongside a measurement, not with measurement. *Stub — expand with: the full text argument in sequence, verbatim passages, and the specific psychometric claims rebutted.* See also: [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]], [[Walter Lippmann]], [[Eugenics]].