Word: jensenism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fact, the reference to Negro inferiority is largely irrelevant to the article's main purpose, which is a declaration of war on those social scientists who discount man's genetic intellectual heritage. "The possible importance of genetic factors in racial behavioral differences," writes Jensen, "has been greatly ignored, almost to the point of being a tabooed subject . . . The slighting of the role of genetics in the study of intelligence can only hinder investigation and understanding of the conditions, processes and limits through which the social environment influences human behavior...
Ability to Reason. To develop this noninflammatory point, and to weigh the genetic contribution to intelligence, Psychologist Jensen relies heavily on the so-called intelligence test. He defines intelligence, somewhat circularly, as "what intelligence tests measure." In education, he says, what they measure is the subject's adaptability to a system that stresses cognition-the ability to reason-and that is designed for normal, middle-class white children. On this contrived scale, the American black typically registers below the American white-on the average, about 15 IQ points. This information is not very new. Moreover, its insight into...
...author uses his theories to attack compensatory education programs, such as Operation Head Start, which assume that the withered young intellect will bloom if it is properly watered. Jensen contends that if substantial IQ improvement is the goal, all such programs will fail. He proposes instead that the schools broaden their approach to accommodate all levels of intelligence. Jensen writes: "Too often, if a child does not learn the school subject matter when taught in a way that depends largely on being average or above average, he does not learn...
...Jensen's more thoughtful critics concede some validity to this point. "Our educational systems," writes Geneticist Lederberg, "often neglect a child's strongest capabilities, and hold him back while focusing on his weaknesses." J. McVicker Hunt, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, agrees with Jensen that the child's first exposure to formal education is confining when it should be expanding. Says Hunt: "I am among those few who are inclined to believe that mankind has not yet developed and deployed a form of early childhood education (from birth to age five) which permits...
Mischievous Tests. But behavioral scientists are less willing to define with Jensen's confidence the comparative roles of heredity and environment in human intelligence. "I agree that it is foolish to deny the possibility of significant genetic differences between races," writes James F. Crow, a population geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, in a response to the Jensen article commissioned by Harvard's Review. "But this is not to say that the magnitude and direction of genetic racial differences are predictable." In American society, he adds, the environmental difference between being black and being white could of itself...