Child Prodigies

...Sir Francis Galton—who had been a child prodigy himself, having learned to read at age two—was driven by his hereditarian conclusions to push for a program of national eugenics...

...Despite many attempts at wit, Radford slips too comfortably into the gnarled syntax and misty jargon of the professional headshrinker, creating the impression that the study of genius has somehow become the scholarly preserve of dolts: If a prodigy is taken to be an individual whose early achievement in any field is exceptional compared with other members of a group with which that individual may be classed, which is the approach taken here, then awareness of as wide a range of potential talents and opportunities as possible, makes the best sense...

...The elder Sidis was a man of fanatic devotion—less to his son, however, than to his pet educational theories...

...A skewed distribution is not necessarily a discontinuous one, and it is not to be supposed that the gap between the child who attracts the label "prodigy" and the one who does not is necessarily empty...

...Radford's gripe, echoed lately by some British and American educators, is that the domestic lives of gifted children are not very well supplemented by a democratic educational system which caters to the average...

...With all her native endowment, however, Edith—like John Stuart Mill and other celebrated geniuses—was gifted as well with a prodigiously attentive father...

...Every sociocultural group present at the time in California was included...

...In this endeavor he was joined by other part-time cranks, such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, the principal theme of the movement being Galton's preachment that smart folks should be encouraged to intermarry...

...Needless to say, Boris was not conspicuous for his warmth and parental affection...

...22.95 John R. Dunlap At the age of three, under the tutelage of his father, John Stuart Mill learned to read Classical Greek...

...Apart from many pleasantly counterintuitive discoveries (e.g., extremely bright children tend not to be nerds, not to have pushy parents, not to be maladjusted, not to burn out in early adulthood), Terman's investigations eventually led to the current interest in, and the grudging provision for, gifted children...

...It would be an irony most peculiar to our era if they had to do so by claiming victim status...

...In some instances, the attention is obsessive, and there have been lurid tragedies like that of William James Sidis (1898-1944), the American son of a Russian émigré and "the world's greatest child prodigy...

...The acknowledged path-breaker in the field of what psychologists call "individual differences" was the English polymath Sir Francis Galton (18221911...

...Among such children, obsessive or destructively eccentric parents of the Sidis variety are rare, and home life tends to be "abnormal" only in the sense of being unusually rich and stimulating...

...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990...

...William's problem was his father, Boris Sidis, a Harvard mathematician and a publicity hound...

...The distribution hasn't changed, and some educators use figures of this sort to contend that the gifted are getting short shrift...

...He entered Harvard at the age of eleven, graduated at sixteen—and thereafter slid steadily into obscurity, low-paying jobs, destitution, and early death...

...But the real trouble is the writing...

...The current age, he says, "seems marked by a hatred of what is outstanding or even what is different...

...Until the late nineteenth century, such occurrences of prodigious talent had been regarded with little more than vague wonderment, spiced now and then by folktales about the perils of genius...

...The Tbrman investigations made it clear that most gifted children come from homes considerably more stable than the average...

...Musing briefly on the eighteenth-century literary prodigy Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide at the age of seventeen, Wordsworth summed up the prevailing attitude towards young genius in calling him "the marvelous boy...

...In the years following his death, Galton's work was almost ritualistically faulted by psychologists for placing too little emphasis on the effects of privileged environment in the occurrence of genius...

...But in the coming years, given the fashion of concern about declining American competitiveness, the likelihood is that gifted children will secure the public accommodation they deserve...

...Although he doesn't pursue the point, Radford attributes such public policy to egalitarian resentment...

...Oddest, perhaps, is the question of whether prodigies can in some sense be produced...

...A few hours of wading through such prose may tempt one to believe that the gap between Radford's ears is empty...

...when a female admirer suggested to Bernard Shaw that he father her child so that the child would have her looks and his brains, Shaw demurred on the grounds that the result might be just the opposite...

...John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...

...The consequence is that most studies of the extremely gifted have been ad hoc case studies, largely anecdotal and even impressionistic...

...Less well known is a lengthy experiment undertaken by Terman in 1921, the first and still the most extensive systematic study of gifted children...

...Asked at the age of four what she wanted to be when she grew up, Edith Sitwell replied, "A genius...

...With their parents' approval, Terman selected 1,528 children whose tested IQs ranged between 130 and 190, a range inhabited by the top one-half percent of the general population...

...By "genius" Galton meant great ability as demonstrated by actual achievement, and in the backgrounds of a large sampling of eminent men (outstanding scholars, brilliant jurists, superior athletes, and the like: statistically, one person in four thousand of the general population) he discovered a tendency for genius to run in families...

...In Child Prodigies, John Radford, a professor of psychology at the East London Polytechnic, attributes the downward-skewed interests of developmental psychologists to funding patterns, which in turn he attributes to "social and political factors too complex to analyze here" (he implies later that the "political factors" have THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 43 something to do with the democratic vice of envy...

...exhaustive preliminary records were compiled (medical histories, physical measurements, school achievements, private interests, tested personality traits, etc...

...In 1983, for example, the state of California spent $17 million on 200,000 students enrolled in programs for the gifted, and nine times that amount ($153 million) on roughly the same number of handicapped students...

...A recurring theme in Child Prodigies is the observation that gifted children tend to enjoy exceptional devotion from their parents...

...To be sure, gifted students are acknowledged in many public schools by special "programs," but the programs are erratic in quality and relatively underfunded...

...T the upper end of the ability range 1 has attracted far less research than the lower...

...With patience, though, one can extract many fascinating details that tease out some interesting questions...

...He attributed his son's spectacular childhood achievements not to any native ability but to the regimen he imposed on William...

...Galton's Hereditary Genius put aside empty speculation to apply statistical procedures to the study of human ability...

...W ith nature the main source of human ability, and with efforts to produce prodigies relegated for now to the kook bin, a more serious question posed by Radford's survey is how to nurture superior talent when it appears...

...at five he was reading Russian, French, and German as well as English...

...By the same age, Macaulay was reading abundantly in history, Mozart was playing the harpsichord, and Jeremy Bentham was reading Latin...

...By the age of three William wasreading fluently...

...and the program, despite a diminishing study group, has been carried on to this day in follow-ups by Terman and his successors, the most recent of five chunky studies having been published in 1987...

...Galton had inspired the French psychologist Alfred Binet to develop the practice of psychological testing, and in 1916 Terman published the Stanford-Binet, the first individual intelligence test in the United States...

...Child Prodigies is certainly a repetitiousconcatenation of fragmentary material, with a lumbering bibliography of 440 items cited through just 219 pages of text...

...the consensus today is to ascribe between 70 and 80 percent of intellectual ability to genetic endowment, whence the term "gifted" for children with outstanding capability...

...Of course she already was one—at least in Terman's sense of the word...

...Galion, in fact, had acknowledged such effects, and more recent research has confirmed the stress he placed on heredity...

...The movement foundered on popular indifference and intermittent farce...

...Looking at the question from another angle, the Stanford psychologist Lewis M. Terman (1877-1956) popularized the term "genius" as referring to high intellectual potential rather than achievement...

...It was Terman who introduced the notion of IQ (Intelligence Quotient), the now familiar measure of general intellectual potential...

...he passed through grade school in six months, and before he was eight he had devised a table of logarithms using the base twelve instead of ten...

...But this is also true in general...

...Radford thus admits in his final chapter that his "approach" is "that of the ragbag, or to dignify it with a scientific name, the inductive method...