Word: jensenism
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...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...
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...