Word: jensenism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DESPITE APPEARANCES, Arthur Jensen's forthcoming article on race and heredity is not simply a revival of the 1930's genre of racist propaganda cloaked in scientific jargon. The Harvard Education Review article is less evil and more dangerous than that. It is a calm and eloquent statement of a very old hypothesis on the roles of environment and gene structure in determining all human intelligence. The hypothesis has implications for racial differences in intelligence, which opens it to attack on moral grounds, but arguing against it solely on an ideological basis would leave it unanswered on its own terms...
...Jensen's piece signals a shifting tide in scholarship on education, and the tide was bound to shove Jensen's position into the forefront sooner or later. It is just as well, therefore, that Jensen's article has put the debate in the open, so that social scientists can meet its arguments head-on. Dealing with such a document as a piece of scholarship may sound disgustingly cool-headed, but the approach has the advantage of outlining the real educational alternatives which blacks face in their movement for equality and independence...
...Though Jensen's work deals with subject matter far broader than the racial issue, his review of the genetic influence on intelligence was apparently triggered by developments in urban education. Recent discoveries have severely jolted scholars of urban school systems. Academics spent the last decade arguing that improving the environment of black children with infusions of money and material would bring them up to educational parity with whites. Out of this academic barrage emerged the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which has poured billions of dollars into compensatory education for the disadvantaged in urban schools. Now, four years...
These developments have forced students of ghetto education to re-examine their assumptions. Some are sticking with compensatory education and looking for elements in the ghetto school environment which they might have overlooked in their previous efforts. Others are looking for totally new perspectives, or--in Jensen's case--making new cases for old ones...
ONLY AN EXPERT in statistics, biology, psychology, and education could adequately explain and criticize Jensen's piece, but even the layman can see some glaring intuitive and scientific problems. Jensen's scientific argument turns around two concepts derived from genetics: genotype and phenotype. Genotype refers to an individual's genetic makeup, his fixed gene structure. Phenotype means the mesh of physical traits which actually characterize an individual at any point in time--a combination of genetic and environmental influences...