The campaign against testing is a good place to reflect on the legacy of Brian Simon and to ask how far his politics and his professional life came together in what he himself called 'Education as a site of struggle'. History of education can be a critical discourse enabling reflection on the effects of policy and practice and the history of intelligence testing provides a place to look at Simon as a successful but bashful political activist. He saw in his 1994 book, "State and Educational Change: Essays in the History of Education and Pedagogy", the period of success in educational reform in universities as being the early 1960s but in this he was too modest. In relation to testing the decisive period came earlier when he produced Intelligence Testing and the Common Secondary School and helped to inspire a generation of political activists first to change their own attitudes to testing, then to change those of other education professionals and parents. The reason for this diffidence or occlusion lies in the effects of cold war on the presence of the Communist Party in public life in the 1950s and in the historical record itself. There was also a diffidence of the role of the intellectual typically displayed by Simon himself in "The Challenge of Marxism" in 1963; when he argued that intellectuals in the party had been laggardly in the campaign for public ownership led by working-class trade unionists. He did not mention here the role of intellectuals in the campaign against testing and he scarcely mentions it in his own autobiography "A Life in Education". In 1947 he reported in his diary that his scepticism about intelligence tests developed when he was teaching in Manchester and Salford. He reports his own use of the term IQ (intelligence quotient) in 1947 to describe a large, mixed-ability class at Abbot Street showing the insights gained by studying psychology under Wiseman on the MEd course. But he began to investigate 11-plus selection when confronted by a lackeen measured intelligence and educational achievement. He found C stream (the least able) first-year pupils performing best in an end-of-year test, IB 'scattered randomly around' and the A stream doing least well. He, like Alice Heim, a successful contemporary critic of intelligence tests used in selection, had begun to realize that 'Psychologists have been generous to a fault with their definitions of intelligence'. Leading British educational psychologist Cyril Burt's colleague and friend, Jack Flugel, similarly argued that psychologists' concept of intelligence needed to be more widely known and better defended.