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Yet some cool scholarly heads in the U.S. conceded the Prime Minister a point or two, if only for his arithmetic. "Statistically, he's right," said Harold Howe, senior lecturer at Harvard's School of Education. Indeed, a report by British Psychologist Richard Lynn published in May 1982 indicated that over the past generation Japan's mean national IQ score has risen 7 points to an average of 111, well above the American norm of 100. Other surveys show that 17 million to 22 million, or 7% to 9%, of adult Americans are functionally illiterate, vs. less than 1% of Japanese. And a study by the University of Michigan ranks Japanese youngsters some 10% higher in math than their U.S. counterparts at the first- and fifth-grade levels.
As for ethnic groups' dragging down the overall U.S. performance, again statistics seem to support the Prime Minister. Historically, black IQ levels have averaged at least 10 points or so below the U.S. standard. According to a 1982 U.S. Department of Education survey, black and Hispanic illiteracy rates range from nearly double to almost four times those of average whites. And in 1985 SAT results showed whites with an average score of 940 (of a possible 1600); Mexican Americans scored 808, Puerto Ricans 777, and blacks 722. Jeanne Chall, director of the reading laboratory at the Harvard School of Education, admits, "We do have whole groups lagging behind." And, she adds, "it's alarming. We're not doing well enough."
Some familiar combatants in the genetics-vs.-environment IQ controversy thought the lag inevitable. William Shockley, retired Stanford professor and Nobel prizewinner in physics, restated his controversial view: "I'm inclined to believe the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin, and thus not remedial to a major degree by practical improvements in environment. For Latins in this country, my conclusion is the same and almost as inescapable."
A majority of academics in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere, however, have found such conclusions entirely escapable. They point out that French Psychologist Alfred Binet created the original IQ ratings in 1905 to identify children with learning difficulties. Binet insisted that his system, "properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence" for the simple reason that intelligence is too complex to be measured mathematically. Nevertheless, much of the world, and especially the U.S., led by Psychologist H.H. Goddard, embraced the IQ scale as a measure of the mind. In the early 1900s Goddard insisted that on the basis of IQ scores vast numbers of Italian, Jewish and Russian immigrants were "high-grade defectives" or morons -- a stone that few would care to cast today.