Alfred Binet was a founder of psychology who took the study of mental processes in a different and highly practical direction. In the 1890s, the members of the Paris Ministry of Education were faced with a problem. They wanted to provide extensive education for all "intelligent" children and more practical, less academic kinds of schooling for less intelligent children. They not only wanted to be fair about choosing the children to be given advanced academic training but also wanted to make the decision when the children were still young. How could they measure something as intangible as a young child's intelligence?