Psychologist on a mission to give every child a Learning Chip

Prof Robert Plomin wants educators to take notice of genes, and has a new big idea – personalised learning, discovers Peter WilbyTo talk about genes and their links to IQ and educational achievement is to risk accusations of elitism, fascism and racism. When the American professor Arthur Jensen published a paper in 1969 concluding that 80% of variance in IQ scores was attributable to genes, not environment – and attempts to boost African-American scores through pre-school intervention were therefore bound to fail – angry students besieged his office in California. The renowned psychologist Hans Eysenck, who backed Jensen, was punched on the nose while lecturing at the London School of Economics.The controversy exploded again in the 1990s when the Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray published their book The Bell Curve, which stated that US blacks had an average IQ of 85 against 103 for whites and that, once this was taken into account, many racial differences in educational attainment and career achievement disappeared. Welfare polices that encouraged poor women to have babies, the book argued, risked lowering average American IQ.Behind all such controversies lay the shadow of Nazi attempts to breed a master race. And teachers have always been suspicious of supporters of nature against nurture because they seem to imply that a child's fate is predetermined and anything schools do is pointless.When Michael Gove's former a...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: The Guardian Psychology Genetics Children Society Education policy Politics Teaching Interviews Schools Science Source Type: news