Letters
Editors Philip Green's discussion of Arthur Jensen's work [in the Spring, Summer, and Fall 1976 issues of Dissent] does not lead the reader to a very accurate understanding of what this work is...
...I suggested plentiful reasons rather to believe that the environmentalists'—or anyone's—main problem has been lack of will, resources, and skills (the art of education being still in its historical infancy...
...This is just what Jensen has done...
...Moreover, the correlations among various tests are the same for black as for white children, and tests of cognitive ability predict scholastic performance the same for black children as for white...
...One cannot, therefore, at one and the same time logically hold that group differences are socially caused but that individual differences involving members of these groups are not so caused...
...Because of that alleged failure we are supposed to believe that "environmentalists" have not yet found a way to translate their theory into educational practice successfully, which is certainly as true for them as for everybody else...
...Ashline, T.R...
...He went on to write a 300-page book that is entirely about racial differences in IQ...
...Havender says absolutely nothing to call it into question...
...Editors Philip Green's discussion of Arthur Jensen's work [in the Spring, Summer, and Fall 1976 issues of Dissent] does not lead the reader to a very accurate understanding of what this work is about...
...Havender has managed to miss it...
...Having successfully made such a determination, by measuring the "heritability" of the trait of interest, one could greatly narrow one's search for a beneficial therapy...
...Jensenism," to sum up, is not a heresy...
...On that issue Jensen's work is not merely inegalitarian, it is also false, and any deductions made from it must be equally false...
...These are only a few examples of the ways that wise educators could readily accommodate, through purely environmental means, variations in learning styles that could well have purely genetic causes, and in this way greatly reduce the differences in overall educational achievement that would otherwise result...
...We can now summarize very briefly the core of ` jensenism...
...It is Jensen's contention that they are not...
...In contrast, properly designed educational sequences centered around the variety of individual mental patterns could potentially do much to palliate the vast scholastic inequalities we currently see...
...Even were the book truthful, it would be useless as a guide to the education of individuals since the only practical lesson we can possibly glean from it is, Every time you see a black child be on the lookout for signs of cognitive inferiority...
...It is also true that the IQ differences between any two individuals are equally refractory to being narrowed by means of making environments more "uniform" (at least as this has been tried so far), regardless of whether the two individuals are both black, both white, or one of each...
...Well-known instances of this are surgical repair of "innate" defects in the newborn, such as harelips or heart abnormalities, blood replacement in Rhincompatible babies, insulin and dietary treatment of genetically conditioned diabetes, and dietary control of genetically caused phenylketonuria...
...As I demonstrated with what I feared was argumentative overkill in the second article of this series—an article that Havender seems not to have read—Jensen has consistently falsified sources and corrupted "scientific" argumentation in order to justify the unsubstantiated assertion that as a group black people lack innate conceptual ability compared to whites as a group...
...In dealing with individual children, race and social class per se seem to make no difference...
...In the first two of my articles I showed that the existing evidence gives little reason to accept that proposition and much reason to reject it...
...Only fools will use the new math to educate a child who consistently fails to grasp verbally logical relationships, and although there may be thousands of such persons in our educational systems they are foolish because they haven't thought very much about what they're doing, not because' they're "environmentalists...
...q 224...
...it would likely magnify them instead...
...Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books/ D.C...
...Clearly, whether investigations disclose an environmental or genetic etiology is by itself entirely neutral as concerns the ease of achieving egalitarian goals...
...In the end the only apparent point in Dr...
...The only thing we actually have established is that we're not as good at changing people through formal education as through varying their place of residence, social class, the nature of their treatment by adults, etc...
...At a key point he paraphrases Jensen's "well-known" conclusion that "genetic factors rather than existing environmental disparities are the main cause of these differences...
...One might begin by seeking to elucidate the etiology of these differences, and a first step would be to divide the possible causative agents into the two categories, environmental or genetic, such as is routinely done by geneticists in tracing the etiology of various diseases...
...For a prescription that would cause us to shade our judgments about individuals so as to bring about the "proper" group distribution is, by its nature, racist...
...Heath, 1976], p. 130...
...What does it matter what is the source of a child's inability to master certain material, as long as the inability is recognized...
...Havender unaccountably ignores...
...Moreover, in the first two articles I provided extensive evidence that all kinds of living conditions do enable people to have on the average higher IQs than they would if they lived under different environmental conditions (evidence that Dr...
...If, instead, genetic factors appeared as the main causes of the condition, then careful study of their specific functioning might well suggest a therapy that could alleviate the condition and that would, of course, be supplied selectively to those particular persons needing it...
...In this case, the very critical matter at issue is whether school systems should selective/v ignore manifest mental differences when these happen to concern members of different social groups, or beneficially adapt to them...
...Jensen likes to believe, and Havender seems to agree, that he has been treated as a heretic...
...genetic causation has been decided...
...Indeed, that is mostly how they have been used, as both Jensen and Havender ought to know...
...But no matter...
...His conclusion is, as is well-known, that genetic factors rather than existing environmental disparities are the main causes of these differences, and his program for dealing with them in a way that would reduce their magnitude stresses, naturally enough, educational diversity suited to each person's needs...
...The real question then is, Which way does Jensen's work lead— toward individuated education or toward arbitrary and discriminatory tracking...
...The bulk of his work is not only irrelevant to that noble proposition but traduces it—vilely...
...First, group differences are inextricably linked to how we interpret individual differences—after all, we simply sum the results of individuals in arriving at the averages for groups...
...either result is equally likely to lead to ways of diminishing invidious differences...
...The only new point he raises purports to be empirical but is actually logical—or, rather, illogical...
...All of these are instances of purely environmental treatments that alleviate the effects of genetic abnormalities, and they make the point very clearly that the finding of a genetic etiology for a given ailment does not carry with it the slightest presumption that it would necessarily be harder to treat through appropriate environmental means than if the ailment were caused by an environmental factor...
...Perhaps some people who have been afraid to take a hard look at his "evidence" and arguments have done that, but I must plead not guilty to the implicit charge of being among them...
...Why did he do all this if he's only interested in demonstrating that individuals should be treated individually in educational systems...
...After all, many conditions now thought to be largely environmentally induced—such as cancer—are notoriously difficult to prevent through control of the causative environmental factors, in part because there are simply so many potentially carcinogenic substances—most of them only weakly so—widely diffused in the milieu that positive identification of any one of them is difficult, and elimination of any one of them would have only a slight effect, if any, on overall cancer rates...
...Havender's lengthy discussion of education seems to be, by implication, that adopting a genetic approach leads us to respect IQ testing more, and IQ tests will tell us 223 definitively who is capable of being educated one way and who another...
...In the next breath we are given to understand that therefore the genetic hypothesis ought to be taken as validated—an invalid syllogism of the most elementary kind...
...But in any event, and worse yet, that book and Jensen's work on race generally is not even truthful...
...Again, I have set out sufficient reasons for acting on the presumption that IQ tests exhibit expressed abilities rather than innate capacities, and I will not reiterate the argument, since once again Dr...
...Thus the sentence I quoted from earlier concludes...
...nurture either way (which is the case), we must become vulgar pragmatists and believe what is useful to us (which is not what Pierce or Dewey had in mind...
...In this light, the past failure of compensatory education is not to be understood as showing that "nothing can be done," but only that these particular programs were based on a faulty interpretation of individual variations in learning styles (to wit, that they didn't "really" exist at all and were merely adventitious reflections of social inequalities that could be simply reversed by a bit of extra "verbal stimulation" and the like...
...What is "true" is "useful" indeed...
...Of course, it is not exactly satisfactory to offer as grounds for accepting the truth of a proposition the allegation that we would like the results of acting on it...
...Or, children might differ, as Jensen has suggested, in their relative aptitudes for learning in associational or conceptual modes...
...I have never seen any demonstration that individual prescription for any educational purpose need take race into account at all...
...A proper summary of it would proceed as follows: Large and socially consequential differences between individuals in learning achievement and IQ are strikingly evident, and we would like to know how to go about to effectively reduce these differences...
...This aspect of Jr...
...These facts argue for a common explanation of the etiology of IQ differences that is valid for blacks as well as for whites, namely, that regardless of ethnic or racial identity, IQ differences among individuals are not mainly due to existing environmental differences...
...Radicals believe in individuated education, so do conservatives, and liberals, and just about everybody who might be asked the question, Do you think mass education or individuated education preferable...
...Jensen, it should be noted, is scrupulous in maintaining that no statement about groups should interfere with our treatment of persons solely in terms of their individual qualities, and his critics should be fair enough to recognize this...
...And the long quotation from Jensen in Havender's letter actually supports this outlook since the twin propositions that blacks have lower lQs than whites in any social class (and thus to Jensen less real cognitive ability), and that IQ tests really do measure their innate abilities faithfully, give this message to blacks: If you happen to have a high level of cognitive ability then fine, you're as good (on the average) as we are, but frankly you probably don't and thus aren't and what's more, little or nothing can be done about it...
...William R. Havender's thoughtful discourse unfortunately misses the point of my articles entirely...
...Havender's critique thus seems irrelevant to what I wrote, and wrong on the facts as well...
...Though the more knowledgeable would doubt that a social system such as ours would provide the resources necessary to establish a system of individuated education for everyone in need of it...
...It is, in my opinion, a hoax...
...If [group differences] are not essentially different [from individual differences], then differences between individuals classified as members of different groups can be treated as individual differences...
...The key and sufficient criteria for judging both the value and the fairness of this procedure should not be that groups are proportionately represented but rather that such diversification is carried out in accord with equally applied standards, and that it in Tact makes education more effective for everyone...
...What on earth is useful about believing in the genetic hypothesis...
...He takes off at some length from Jensen's statement that "compensatory education has been tried and it has failed...
...If the heritability measurement suggested an environmental causation, one would then seek to tease out from the total environment the particular factors that caused the condition, and to eliminate them as a cause of pathology...
...Or, children could differ in the rates at which they could process and absorb new information...
...So does the environmentalist hypothesis (an individual acts as a member of a class in appearance, but the real person underneath is being hidden...
...Though there are average group differences on cognitive ability tests, we find it impossible either by direct inspection or by fine-grained statistical analyses to discriminate between the intelligence test protocols of black and white children...
...Jensen's work gives us such an unequivocal answer that I fail to see how Dr...
...There is just nothing you can find in the child's test performance itself that will tell you whether a child with an IQ, of...
...It is worth underlining that attempts to impose a uniform educational structure upon a genetically variegated population of this sort would no more achieve, however well-meant, the outcome of lessened differences 221 than a policy of absolutely uniform medical treatment of all newborn babies—including those with harelips, Rhincompatible blood, or phenylketonuria—would lessen the severity of these differences...
...It is reasonable to imagine, for example, that individuals might differ for genetic reasons in their rates of mental maturation—that is, of passage through Piaget's several stages of mental "readiness" to grasp certain concepts and skills...
...My three articles—at least the two that dealt with Jensen—were not about genetics and individuals (and, as I noted, there is doubtless some genetic causation of differences in the various kinds of intelligence as between individuals), but about genetics and race...
...In other words, IQ tests appear to measure the same kind of mental faculty, with the same reliability and predictablity of scholastic achievement, for blacks and whites...
...Regrettably, it is not yet sufficiently appreciated that any normative statement about the relative standing of 222 groups—including the one requiring that they be represented in equal proportions everywhere throughout the society—is by its nature racist...
...This approach can be directly applied to identifying the causes of differences in IQ...
...That is pernicious nonsense...
...Jensen, "Equality and Diversity in Education,"in Education, Inequality and National Policy, N.F...
...Therefore, schools must not treat these differences as superficial and thus easily ignored for educational purposes...
...He contends that the evidence presently available shows that genetic differences are far more significant than existing inequalities in the social environment in accounting for individual variations in learning patterns...
...The same is true of scholastic achievement tests...
...And when matched for IQ, blacks and whites learn the same information, at the same rates, and by means of the same educational procedures...
...What are the reasons for making any statement at all about the causes of group differences...
...And second, it cautions us against adducing variations in group representations that might happen to arise in the course of the assortment of individuals into diverse instructional sequences as presumptive proof that this assortment is unfair...
...but in our class- and caste-bound society they are much more likely to be used to establish formal or informal tracking systems...
...Is this egalitarianism...
...Havender's defense of Jensen...
...instead they should form the basis of an individually diversified educational structure that promises to be far more beneficial for all students than the system we have now...
...If so, then an educational system that presents new information to each child in a timed progression carefully related to when, regardless of chronological age, this individual child is actually "ready" to receive it, has a greater potential for reducing differences in ultimately realized scholastic achievement than a system that ignores such differences and forces all children, "ready" or not, into a uniform learning sequence...
...Once again, a school system that takes such individual variations into account—say, by permitting time for more repetitions for those needing it without overtones of "fault" or "dumbness" or "failure"—should have a better chance of decreasing differences in achievement than a system that expects all its students to learn at exactly the same rates...
...and his program for dealing with them in a way that would reduce their magnitude stresses, naturally enough, educational diversity suited to each person's needs...
...And a common educational prescription, namely, individually adapted instructional pathways, seems to offer the best hope for reducing the differences in scholastic performance between all individuals, and, thereby, also between the groups they might compose...
...Since much basic information can be taught in either conceptual ("new" math, phonetic reading) or associational ("old" math, "look-say" reading) modes, an educational system that makes either approach available to every student depending on whichever is in fact most effective for him will, as before, probably be far superior in narrowing differences in achievement as compared with a system that uses exclusively one or the other mode...
...That it justifies individuated education...
...A low IQ score simply tells us that action is necessary somewhere in the child's life, or in the society's structure, but the problem is just as likely to be in, say, the brutal home life of an individual or the constricting circumstances of a group as in allegedly inherent capacities...
...Because the implications of this suggestion have been so widely misunderstood, it's worth spelling out a few specific ideas...
...Is Jensen's message about the liberation of individuals or is it about the invidious comparison between groups...
...Well-known conclusions can be false, though...
...In fact, it is very hard to find differences between groups that do not behave just like individual differences as far as abilities and schooling are concerned...
...But he has another, perhaps more important argument: that Jensen's genetic hypothesis ought to be appealing to Dissent readers—to egalitarians generally—because it offers grounds for a more liberating approach to education than does the contrary, environmentalist hypothesis...
...These latter conditions may not have to do with what is ordinarily understood by "compensatory education," but they're certainly not the working out of genetic codes...
...Let us pretend that, there being no finally determinative evidence about nature vs...
...Finally, consideration of the uses of IQ tests leads us to the major shortcoming in Dr...
...What we believe about the source of group differences inevitably feeds back to color our interpretation of individual differences, and the sorts of educational prescriptions that follow therefrom...
...Havender (who holds a Ph.D...
...It is, therefore, amply evident that only a public policy that affirms individuals as the fundamental social units in relation to which justice is defined—and that hence allows group representations to fall wherever they happen to fall as the fully dependent consequence of individually fair treatment—can effectively advance us toward the splendid goal of social justice for all...
...Norris, eds...
...The lesson is that the true etiology of such differences has an existence that is wholly independent of whether or not we have correctly diagnosed them, and policies based on an incorrect understanding run the grave risk of exacerbating rather than decreasing these differences...
...say, 100 is black or white...
...Now, what about blacks...
...in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley) does not challenge any aspect of that analysis...
...Pezzullo, and C.I...
...The famous "genetic hypothesis," for example, which has become the cornerstone of Jensen's subsequent work, is that "genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference" (my emphasis...
...A.R...
...Thus, the matter of correctly identifying whether differences in IQ are caused mainly by existing environmental or genetic variations is an absolutely essential step . for the successful realization of egalitarian goals...
...fully as much so as when a statement about the "superiority" of one group relative to another is, wrongfully, used to justify ignoring the qualities of the specific individuals involved in a given selection...
...The normative posture of egalitarianism should, therefore, operate only in choosing what policies to follow after the purely empirical question of environmental vs...
...IQ tests can indeed be used for individuated education (to identify "underachievers," e.g...
...The critical consideration is whether or not they are to be regarded as a special category for whom the above generalizations are not valid...
...In this way we would, in effect, diversify (rather than render more uniform) the environment to suit each individual...
...See my article, "Sense and Nonsense about the Jensenist Heresy," in the Alternative: An American Spectator, April 1976...
...search for his or her underlying talent to bring it to light rather than accepting the environmentally distorted report about "intelligence" contained in IQ scores...
...What does it matter what is the source of the child's ability to learn in another way, so long as that ability is recognized...
Vol. 24 • April 1977 • No. 2
