Anyone who has followed the decades-long controversies over the
role of genes in IQ scores will recognize the names of the two
leading advocates of opposite conclusions on that subject —
Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at
Berkeley and Professor James R. Flynn, an American expatriate at
the University of Otago in New Zealand.
What is so unusual in the academic world of today is that
Professor Flynn’s latest book, Are We Getting
Smarter? is dedicated to Arthur Jensen, whose integrity he
praises, even as he opposes his conclusions. That is what
scholarship and science are supposed to be like, but so seldom
are.
Professor Jensen, who died recently, is best known for reopening
the age-old controversy about heredity versus environment with his
1969 article titled, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic
Achievement?”
His answer — long since lost in the storms of controversy that
followed — was that scholastic achievement could be much improved
by different teaching methods, but that these different teaching
methods were not likely to change I.Q. scores much.
Jensen argued for educational reforms, saying that “scholastic
performance — the acquisition of the basic skills — can be
boosted much more, at least in the early years, than can the IQ”
and that, among “the disadvantaged,” there are “high school
students who have failed to learn basic skills which they could
easily have learned many years earlier” if taught in different
ways.
But, regardless of what Arthur Jensen actually said, too many in
the media, and even in academia, heard what they wanted to hear. He
was lumped in with earlier writers who had promoted racial
inferiority doctrines that depicted some races as being unable to
rise above the level of “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
These earlier writers from the Progressive era were saying, in
effect, that there was a ceiling to the mental potential of some
races, while Jensen argued that there was no ceiling but, by his
reading of the evidence, a difference in average IQ, influenced by
genes.
When I first read Arthur Jensen’s landmark article, back in
1969, I was struck by his careful and painstaking analysis of a
wide range of complex data. It impressed me but did not convince
me. What it did was cause me to dig up more data on my own.
A few years later, I headed a research project that, among other
things, collected tens of thousands of past and present IQ scores
from a wide range of racial and ethnic groups at schools across the
United States. Despite serious limitations in these data, due to
constraints of time and circumstances, these data nevertheless
threw some additional light on the subject.
A feature article of mine in the Sunday New York Times
Magazine of March 27, 1977 pointed out that any number of
white groups, here and overseas, had at some point in time had IQs
similar to, and in some cases lower than, the IQs of black
Americans. During the First World War, for example, white soldiers
from some Southern states scored lower on army mental tests than
black soldiers from some Northern states.
Professor Jensen read this article and came over to Stanford
University to meet with me and discuss the data. That is what a
scholar should do when challenged. But the opposite approach was
shown by Professor Kenneth B. Clark, who earlier had sought to
dissuade me from doing IQ research. He said it would “dignify”
Jensen’s work, which Clark wanted ignored or discredited
instead.
Unfortunately, Professor Clark’s ideological approach became far
more common in academia, so much so that Jensen’s attempts to speak
on campuses around the country provoked dangerous disruptions,
instead of reasoned arguments.
Years later, Professor James R. Flynn created the biggest
challenge to the hereditary theory of intelligence, when he showed
that whole nations had risen to much higher results on IQ tests in
just one or two generations. Genes don’t change that fast.
Professor Flynn told me that he would never have done his
research, except that it was provoked by Jensen’s research. That is
just one of the reasons for having a free marketplace of ideas,
instead of turning academic campuses into fortresses of politically
correct intolerance.
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