Word: jensenism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Working with these concepts, Jensen tries to construct a formula for measuring the relative strengths of gene structure and environment in determining phenotypes. He comes up with a statistical measure for "heretability"--a term which refers to the proportion of individual differences which are attributable to genetic influences. As Jensen takes pains to make clear, the concept of heretability has no meaning when applied to an individual. One can state that gene structure accounts for 80 per cent of the difference in observed heights of all white males in the U.S. But one cannot say that gene structure accounts...
...Jensen goes on to review many studies on the IQ's of different members of the same families and conclude that heretability explains 75 per cent of the observed differences in all human intelligence (as measured by traditional tests). The other 25 per cent is determined by environmental factors...
...developing his argument, Jensen, makes some notable contributions to educational thought -- contributions which almost all the respondents (environmentalists solicited by the Harvard Education Review to criticize Jensen's piece) praised and accepted. Jensen disposes first of the concept of the "average child," the assumption that all children are essentially alike in the way they learn and in what they learn best. This notion, that kids are like so many dolls from the same assembly line, is responsible for much of the curricular and instructional rigidity that has crippled both black and white education in this country. Jensen's emphasis...
...Jensen also makes elaborately clear the built-in bias of traditional intelligence tests, and their inadequacies as measures of intellectual ability in the twentieth century. Intelligence tests, he points out, grew out of formal European education at the turn of the century and have remained essentially unchanged since...
DESPITE THESE contributions, however, Jensen's analysis seems to go dangerously astray at some points; this is nowhere more obvious than in his treatment of racial differences. Jensen, it should be noted, explicitly rejects the notion that anyone should make policy on the hypothesis that genetic factors are primarily responsible for differences in achievement. The first reason, he admits, is that we have no studies dealing with the heretability of characteristics within racial groups. "Our knowledge of the heretability of intelligence in different racial and cultural groups," he admits, "is nil." Jensen goes on to affirm that he raises...