[Paleopsych] NYT Mag: The Prodigy Puzzle
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The Prodigy Puzzle
New York Times Magazine, 5.11.30
http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2005/11/20/magazine/1124987258967.html
By ANN HULBERT
'So you're the geniuses," Senator Carl Levin said, looking pleased as
he peered over his glasses. He was addressing the flaxen-haired Heidi
Kaloustian, a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Michigan, and
John Zhou, a superfriendly 17-year-old senior at Detroit Country Day
School, unusual visitors to Room 269 of the Russell Office Building on
Capitol Hill. Michigan had distinguished itself, Levin had been
informed: the state boasted two Davidson Fellows, and he had clearly
been told these teenagers came trailing brainy superlatives. "Genius
loves company," announced the September press release about the
students who had won scholarships awarded annually since 2001 by the
Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a foundation that supports
"profoundly intelligent" youths, a more recent term for off-the-charts
children. "Seventeen prodigies," the press release went on, were "to
be honored at the Library of Congress for contributions to society" in
the fields of science, math, technology, music and literature.
Even among these superstars, the young Michiganders stood out. All the
accolades and attention added up to a thrilling but evidently also
somewhat disorienting experience, at least for one of them. "I'm
generally pretty shy, hesitant to show my work," Heidi told me over
the summer - a reticence that had only partly been drummed out of her
by joining her high school's poetry-slam team at a teacher's
insistence. Sitting on the couch awaiting the senator, she looked
slightly dazed at being in the limelight: Heidi was one of the four
Davidson "fellow laureates" this year - recipients of the top $50,000
scholarship awards for projects they had submitted. She was also the
first laureate ever in literature, with a writing portfolio she titled
"The Roots of All Things." John, a scientist whose 2005
accomplishments also included semifinalist standing in the national
math, physics and biology olympiads, was taking his $25,000 award in
stride. He was one of five winners at that level. The remaining eight
Fellows received $10,000 each - money to be disbursed for approved
educational purposes for up to 10 years.
Apparently feeling his visitors deserved more than the usual small
talk, Senator Levin forged on with "Where are your souls?"
"You mean what are our projects?" John responded, ready with the title
of his: "A Study of Possible Interactions Among Rev1, Rev3 and Rev7
Proteins From Saccharomyces Cerevisiae." John laughed along with
everyone else when Levin remarked, "I understood the word 'protein,' "
and with the confident charm of a youth who has spent lots of time
with adults, he told the senator he really enjoyed seeing him at a
recent AIDS walk in Michigan (for which John had organized a school
team). Turning to Heidi, who explained that she wrote both poetry and
prose, Levin was prompted to joke, "So writers are worth twice as much
as scientists these days?" It was a short step to reminiscences about
college-tuition bills for his own daughters. The Senate photographer
then sprang into action, arranging a classic portrait of future
promise: professorial senator in the middle, flanked on one side by a
bright-eyed youth and on the other by a mother wearing a grin her
child might later tell her looks goofy.
For the Davidson Fellows who came to Washington in late September for
a gathering that culminated in an evening reception at the Library of
Congress, the visit to Capitol Hill was more than a photo op. It was
an effort to help promote the vision of their patrons, the founders of
the Reno-based Davidson Institute, Bob and Jan Davidson. Drawing on a
fortune earned in the educational-software business, the Davidsons
established themselves as a well-endowed new presence on the
gifted-education scene in 1999. Their goal is not just to support
extraordinary youthful achievements, though their contributions to the
cause of enriching precocious childhoods have been wide-ranging. The
institute's enterprises include, in addition to the fellowships, a
free consulting service now assisting 750 "Young Scholars" between the
ages of 4 and 18 who qualify with top test scores (99.9th percentile,
I.Q.'s of at least 145) or, for those without a battery of
assessments, portfolio submissions. The Davidsons have also begun the
Think Summer Institute, offering college courses for 12- to
15-year-olds. Next fall the Davidson Academy, a public middle and high
school for the profoundly gifted, will open on the Reno campus of the
University of Nevada. How much pleasure the Davidsons, in their early
60's, take in celebrating the accomplishments of the fellows was
obvious at the reception: Bob, strong-jawed and a jokester, and the
elfin Jan glowed like godparents as they beckoned the multicultural
array of prize-winners up to the dais to speak about their projects -
"prodigious work," a term the Institute favors, ranging from the
adorable 6-year-old Marc Yu's piano performance to the 17-year-old
Kadir Annamalai's work on the "growth of germanium nanowires," useful
in thermoelectric devices.
It is the Davidsons' other, related aim that calls forth a different
kind of fervor. Authors (with Laura Vanderkam) of a book called
"Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Minds" (2004), they
are on a mission to remedy what they are convinced is a widespread
neglect of exceptionally talented children. That means challenging the
American myth that they are weirdos or Wunderkinder best left to their
own devices or made to march with the crowd. "By denying our most
intelligent students an education appropriate to their abilities," Jan
Davidson warns a nation in the midst of a No Child Left Behind
crusade, "we may also be denying civilization a giant leap forward."
Precocious children are not only avid learners eager for more than
ordinary schools often provide, the Davidsons emphasize; they are also
a precious - and imperiled - resource for the future. The Davidsons,
joined by many other advocates of the gifted, maintain that it is
these precocious children who, if handled right, will be the creative
adults propelling the nation ahead in an ever more competitive world.
As things stand, the argument goes, the highly gifted child is an
endangered species in need of outspoken champions like the Davidsons,
who are role models for the "supportive, advocating parent" they
endorse.
The youths have their chance to engage in advocacy, too, and the
Davidsons had selected very personable prodigies to visit Washington
to publicize the don't-hold-children-back message. (Video
presentations are part of the fellowship application process.)
"Rounded like an egg" is the simile John Zhou used in the SAT-prep
classes he taught (though he himself, a perfect scorer, didn't take
any), where he recommends blending a well-honed talent with other
interests to "erase the image of the nerd or the geek" - a balanced
profile the Davidsons would surely endorse. Their fellows fitted it
and proved ideal ambassadors of well-tended youthful brilliance.
Admirably poised, they were getting precocious practice for the future
eminence that, they were told more than once that day, awaits them.
The Davidsons are not the first Americans dedicated to cultivating
early promise and dismantling the popular image of highly gifted
children as misfits, an affront to a nation founded on egalitarian
principles. More than three-quarters of a century ago, the Stanford
psychologist Lewis Terman, armed with his newly minted I.Q. test, set
out to challenge the myth that unusually intelligent and talented
children are "puny, overspecialized in their abilities and interests,
emotionally unstable, socially unadaptable, psychotic and morally
undependable." His longitudinal "Genetic Studies of Genius" aimed to
prove the opposite: highly gifted youths tended not only to enjoy more
wholesome childhoods than ordinary kids but also to become
extraordinary adults. His labors have since helped spawn a rich field
of research and outreach devoted to exceptionally gifted children -
though you might not guess it from the embattled rhetoric employed by
gifted-child advocates in general, not just the Davidson Institute.
The lament uttered half a century ago that in philistine America
"there are no little leagues of the mind" could not be made in our
turn-of-the-millennium meritocracy. Thanks precisely to programs like
those run by the Davidson Institute, there is what you might call a
farm system devoted to finding talent and developing it, and though
the process isn't streamlined, it has become ever more extensive. You
merely have to look at the résumés of the Davidson Fellows, which list
a stunning array of distinctions - from music and Intel competitions
to math and science olympiads to participation in highly selective
summer programs. Even as they sound the alarm, prominent advocates
themselves celebrate the widening span of resources. Consider, for
example, "A Nation Deceived," the Templeton National Report on
Acceleration issued last year and subtitled, "How Schools Hold Back
America's Brightest Students." In its brief for more grade skipping
and subject acceleration, it indicts an educational system that indeed
gives talented students short shrift. (Federal money for the "gifted
and talented" is minuscule compared with the quarter billion in this
year's No Child Left Behind budget, and state and local efforts,
though often better, are uneven.) Yet in the course of promoting the
benefits of leaping ahead, "A Nation Deceived" also extols "a whole
host of outside-of-school opportunities, including award ceremonies,
summer programs, after-school or Saturday programs, distance-learning
programs and weekend workshops and seminars," to which the talent
search serves as a "gateway" for the topmost students, who also have a
variety of early college options to consider, like California State
University at Los Angeles's lively early-entrance program. Julian
Stanley, a Johns Hopkins psychology professor and a pioneer of the
gifted-child movement, marveled not long before he died last summer at
age 87 at how a dearth of opportunities had given way to a "wealth of
facilitative options."
Perhaps the time has come to examine a rather different myth, embraced
by gifted-child advocates themselves: that children of unusual
intelligence and accomplishments remain a misunderstood, marginalized
resource in a culture obsessed with equity and prone to conformity. In
fact, youthful prodigiousness is the leading edge of a wider cultural
preoccupation with early high performance in our meritocratic era.
Among the educated elite, the superchild has become the model child,
and the model parent is an informed advocate with an eye trained on
his or her child's future prospects. The unusual fate of the
precocious child - to become adultified early and yet to remain
hovered over for longer - is echoed in the situation of the privileged
child, ushered along a highly scheduled path of credentialed
performance from cradle onward, with college and career ever in mind.
In short, thanks not least to the gifted-child movement itself, the
mission of discovering and molding precocious talent has been
mainstreamed more successfully than anyone expected. Once in a while,
the more mundane variety of Ivy League-aspiring kids and their
ambitious parents pause to ask themselves whether the ethos entails
too much early pressure to compete. For truly extraordinary kids, a
different version of the question arises, but it is considered less
often: could it be that in the quest to pinpoint and promote
exceptional youthful promise, testers and contests and advocates may
have unwittingly introduced early pressure to conform, not to the
crowd but to an assiduously monitored, preprofessionalized and
future-oriented trajectory? If the mold-breaking creativity and
innovation that advocates invoke are what society wants more of,
perhaps it is worth asking whether anointing the ranks of
talent-search stars with a sense of foreordained distinction and
steering them onto a prize- and degree-laden fast track, the earlier
the better, may have its costs. Of course, it is every parent's hope
to help satisfy highly gifted children's zeal for mastery and give
them fulfilling childhoods, and programs like those the Davidson
Institute runs help make that easier. But a look back over a century
suggests it may be hubris if the goal of the guidance is to shape
truly exceptional destinies in adulthood. Well-intentioned efforts to
smooth the path and hone expertise in a hurry might even - who knows?
- be a hindrance in the mysterious process by which mature originality
ultimately expresses itself.
L ong before 20th-century psychology turned its attention to young
geniuses, children with extraordinary powers were enshrined in myth as
figures to be at once feared and revered. Baby Hercules had occasion
to display his prowess in strangling serpents because jealous Juno,
angered that Jupiter had sired a son with a mere mortal, dispatched
snakes to his cradle. Twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple after
Passover, "sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and
asking them questions," invites not only astonishment "at his
understanding and answers," but also rebukes from his bewildered
parents; they're unsettled by his insistence that he "must be about my
Father's business," well aware that he isn't referring to Joseph. In
the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the first early Christian
attempt to fill in Jesus' life before that temple story, awe is mixed
with terror. Jesus is an alarming little boy who doesn't merely make
real birds out of clay and work other miracles but causes the death of
those who scold him for not resting on the Sabbath and shames masters
who try to instruct him in his letters. From the divine/demonic child
of antiquity to the Romantic era's idealization of the innocent
imaginative genius was perhaps not as big a leap as it seems: the
prodigy was the very emblem of prophecy, in touch with mystical truth
and powers outside of human time. In his different guises, the
phenomenal young emissary came bearing an implicit message: adults
beware.
Lewis Terman, however, was not a man readily daunted, and his endeavor
embodied the ambitions and the confusions - and the elusive
predictions - that have marked gifted research and development ever
since. Five years after he revised Alfred Binet's intelligence test,
creating what became known as the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test, he put it
to use in a pioneering survey of a little-understood population. When
Terman began seeking gifted California schoolchildren to participate
in his "Genetic Studies of Genius" in 1921, he was undertaking the
first youthful talent search, eager not just to explore the nature of
gifted children but ultimately to predict and improve their chances of
future greatness. Convinced that intellectual capacity was innate, he
was a eugenicist eager to see the brightest selected out and trained
up to guide society. But he was also aware that no one knew when or
how, much less which, buds of brilliance might ultimately produce
glorious flowers. Terman became determined to see to it that the
proverb "early ripe, early rotten" wouldn't describe their fate. He
would do his best to boost, not just stand back and trace, the
trajectories of subjects, whose well-rounded giftedness augured such
promise.
If that interfered with the purity of his findings and predictions,
so, too, did Terman's methods for choosing his subjects. His approach
made it less than surprising that the Termites, as the study
participants were nicknamed, proved exemplary schoolchildren, not
lopsided or eccentric at all. Terman's tool, the I.Q. test, was
devised in and for an academic context, focusing on verbal and
quantitative reasoning and memory skills, which meant scores at the
high end correlated closely with classroom success. He was in search
of the overall high performers, and his fieldwork further ensured a
sample low on idiosyncratic characters. Since Terman didn't have the
resources to comprehensively test the more than a quarter-million
students in the California school districts he was looking at, he
enlisted teachers to help make the first cut. They supplied him with
the kids they considered the best, a group unlikely to include "some
nerdy person in the corner mumbling to himself," points out Dean Keith
Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California,
Davis, who specializes in the scientific study of historical genius.
Testing this cohort - as well as other batches of bright children he
rounded up earlier - Terman emerged with an overwhelmingly white and
middle-class sample of roughly 1,500 students whose average age was 11
and whose I.Q.'s ranged between 135 and 200, about the top 1 percent.
(The mean I.Q. in this group was 151, and 77 subjects tested at 170 or
higher.) It is worth noting that his methods selected for a
conscientious breed of parents as well, given that lengthy
questionnaires about their children were part of the drill.
The data reviewed in the first volume of findings, in 1925, demolished
"the widespread opinion that typically the intellectually precocious
child is weak, undersized or nervously unstable." Terman's inventories
- of physical and personality traits, books read, intellectual and
recreational interests, family background - revealed children
physically superior as well as more trustworthy and honest, and much
better at school (where about 85 percent of them had skipped grades)
than a nongifted group used for a rough comparison. On the East Coast,
a fellow psychologist, Leta Hollingworth of Columbia University
Teachers College - a forerunner whom the Davidsons salute - chimed in
with similar positive findings about the gifted students she studied
in two public schools. For the rare specimens with I.Q.'s of 180 or
higher, the record was somewhat more mixed on the question of social
adjustment (more recent studies on "psychological well-being" continue
to conflict); Hollingworth drew particular attention to the problem of
disengagement at school. But home life in their samples' comparatively
well-off and small families seemed enviable. "Fortunately,"
Hollingworth wrote, "the majority of gifted children fall by heredity
into the hands of superior parents, who are themselves of fine
character and worthy to 'set example.' "
With this portrait, the pioneers confronted a tension that exists to
this day in the quest to rally support for the select cohort. Such a
positive account of gifted children was good for their image, but less
so for the message that, as Terman proclaimed at the close of the
first volume, "the great problems of genius" require urgent attention.
The young geniuses seemed to be doing nicely - perhaps all too
competently, in fact. In the 1930 follow-up volume to "Genetic Studies
of Genius," the Terman team betrayed a hint of defensiveness that
reappeared in the 25-year and 35-year follow-ups. Anticipating later
critics, they cautioned against undue expectations. "The title is not
meant to imply that the thousand or more subjects who have entered
into the investigations described are all potential geniuses in the
more common meaning of that term. A few of the group may ultimately
achieve that degree of distinction, but not more than a few."
The urge to forecast, then as now, drives research on childhood
giftedness - yet as Malcolm Gladwell noted in a recent talk, precocity
in general doesn't turn out to be a very reliable predictor of truly
exceptional mature performance. When a colleague of Terman's,
Catharine Cox, undertook the curious exercise of retrospectively
computing the youthful I.Q.'s of 300 adult geniuses in the past
(drawing on facts from their biographies), she found they were high -
but far from the whole story. She also discovered the importance of
other qualities, especially persistence and confidence. And she
presciently warned that tests "cannot measure spontaneity of
intellectual activity; perhaps, too, they do not sufficiently
differentiate between high ability and unique ability, between the
able individual and the extraordinary genius." Cox concluded that "the
extraordinary genius who achieves the highest eminence is also the
gifted individual whom intelligence tests may discover in childhood,"
with the crucial caveat that "the converse of this proposition is yet
to be proved."
Focusing on a small cohort of children with I.Q.'s above 180,
Hollingworth's case studies couldn't supply clear-cut evidence that a
high-testing childhood was a precursor of later extraordinariness. The
few she followed into early maturity excelled in their early 20's at
academic and intellectual work, and won honors. But she wasn't sure
what to conclude about creativity and originality, plainly
disappointed that her sample didn't display more. She speculated that
this was partly because of nurture: "so harnessed to the organized
pursuit of degrees," in one child's case, and subjected to an
"education so scrupulously supervised and so sedulously recorded that
he had little time for original projects" in another. "The gifted
group at midlife," as the Termites were called in the 35-year
follow-up study, were highly educated for the time, professionally
very successful and well adjusted. But the Terman team tried not to
sound too let down that "a majority of gifted women prefer housewifery
to more intellectual pursuits," right in step with postwar America.
In 1956, the year Terman died, a Nobel Prize was awarded to William
Shockley, who as a California schoolboy didn't make the cut for the
Termites but went on to help invent the transistor (and was later
hailed as a catalyst in the creation of Silicon Valley, and also
pilloried as a racist eugenicist). In 1968, another reject, Luis
Alvarez, won the prize for his work in elementary particle physics. No
Termite ever became a Nobel laureate, though some became
well-published scientists and multiple patent holders. Alumni include
journalists, poets and movie directors as well as professors, among
whom psychologists have been particularly distinguished, perhaps not
surprisingly. Terman, after all, pulled Stanford strings and did
everything he could to help his protégés, who had been selected for
what are often now called "schoolhouse gifts" and had grown up as a
self-identified group imbued, not least by him, with expectations of
academically approved achievement.
The fact that "the group has produced no great musical composer," as
the study's authors wistfully noted, "and no great creative artist"
perhaps wasn't so surprising, either. In part, of course, that is
because such figures don't surface very often. In part, it was because
"special abilities" weren't what they were testing for - the I.Q.'s
appeal was its assessment of general cognitive ability, and the
"globally gifted" child was the figure the Terman group fixed on. But
in part it was also because when special talents were spotted in their
high I.Q. mix, they resisted systematic analysis. Fewer than half of
the kids who had shown distinctive artistic abilities stuck with those
interests, though musicians were more likely to. (Even in music, the
field best known for spawning prodigies, the yield of distinguished
mature artists is low. Out of an unusually large concentration of 70
young musical marvels in the San Francisco area in the 1920's and
30's, only 6 went on to notable adult careers: Leon Fleisher, Ruth
Slenczynska and Hephzibah Menuhin on the piano, and Isaac Stern,
Ruggiero Ricci and Yehudi Menuhin on the violin.)
Terman and his colleagues focused on a batch of precocious literary
girls. The researchers set out to compare their work with the
juvenilia of eminent writers of the past. But quality and development
tended to be highly uneven. That was obvious, for example, in a
sampling of the 100 poems produced between ages 6 and 8 by the
prolific Betty Ford, an engaging girl with an I.Q. of 188 who was said
to skip and dance as she dictated her poetry, if she wasn't feverishly
typing it out by herself. Nor did the juvenilia of the great provide a
steady standard. In fact, a panel of judges rated poems by the young
Longfellow and Shelley below those of Betty and other nobodys. As
Terman's team concluded: "One would hardly be justified in attempting
to devise methods for the prediction of adult literary accomplishment.
Too many factors other than natural ability go to determine the amount
and merit of achievement." The 8-year-old Betty herself suggested as
much in "Blackbirds," which the judges rated among the poorest of her
poems: "But to tell what I have in mind,/Is harder by far, than to
guess/What the twitter of those birds mean,/As they spatter their
words about."
The Stanford-Binet I.Q. test reached middle age along with the
Termites, looking disappointingly staid itself. At least it did from
the vantage of those increasingly convinced that youthful giftedness
could not be reduced to a fixed and innate general intellectual
ability or potential. In postwar America, the terms "gifted" and
"talented" crowded out "genius," which sounded suspiciously elitist,
and a quest was under way for a wider, democratic conception of human
excellence. Psychologists pushed toward a more multifaceted
understanding of giftedness, turning their attention to "divergent
thinking" and creative capacities - fluency, originality, flexibility
- as well as to a wider range of less distinctively intellectual
abilities, like "task commitment." It was time, too, to take a more
interactive, social view of the emergence and growth of talent, whose
very existence in childhood, after all, depended on adult recognition.
Youthful giftedness could not be fully appreciated, or cultivated,
without viewing it as a social construct, a capacity that flourishes
thanks to a confluence of forces: a domain of knowledge with clearly
demarcated rules a child can master, adult models and mentors ready to
assist and a receptive cultural context. All of these factors help
explain why highly structured, permanently valued fields like music
and math prove especially hospitable to prodigies. It's also why
precocious mental calculators and map makers, for example, were once a
sought-after variety of prodigy and no longer are.
Some 50 years after Terman, giftedness was a social construct in flux
and in the spotlight. The first federal definition of "children
capable of high performance," announced in the Office of Education's
Marland Report of 1972, which led to legislation on education for the
gifted, was a symptomatic catch-all. The formulation covered students
"with demonstrated achievement and/or ability in any of the following
areas, singly or in combination: general intellectual ability,
specific academic aptitude, creative or productive thinking,
leadership ability, visual- or performing-arts aptitude, psychomotor
ability." The lineup still led off with what Ellen Winner, professor
of psychology at Boston College and the author of "Gifted Children:
Myths and Realities" (1996), describes as "the smooth and even image
of the globally gifted child." Yet narrower talents - and perhaps
quirkier and more uneven ones - now received independent billing, for
the old faith had been shaken that I.Q. and creativity were so closely
correlated after all. The problem was, there were no good tools for
tracking skills like "creative or productive thinking," and in any
case, what could that really mean in childhood, a period dedicated to
mastering, not generating, knowledge? Looking back to the 1980's,
David Henry Feldman, who teaches child development at Tufts University
and is the author, with Lynn T. Goldsmith, of "Nature's Gambit: Child
Prodigies and the Development of Human Potential" (1986), recalls a
sense of frustration with psychometricians and with "creativity as
measured by creativity tests, as in how many ways can you use or
describe a brick" - but also a sense of ferment. He was busy examining
the uncanny extremes that Terman's study had skirted - Feldman's book
probes six specialized prodigies and their hothouselike homes - and he
found himself sharing ideas with an eclectic array of psychologists
tackling the development of creativity from different angles. Among
them were Howard Gardner, who was soon to begin work on his theory of
"multiple intelligences," and Howard Gruber and Dean Keith Simonton,
both busy looking at the history of creative eminence.
But the impulse to "recharge" the prodigy notion with some of its
"original power and mystery," as Feldman put it in his book, failed to
gather scientific momentum, he now ruefully admits. (He awaits further
brain research.) In the meantime, a less global assessment method than
the I.Q. exam had proved itself ideal for identifying the most
familiar item on that Marland Report list of special capacities,
"specific academic aptitude." There is nothing like a ready tool, and
a numerical measure, to cut a phenomenon down to more accessible - and
usable - size in America.
The test was the SAT, which Julian Stanley, who established Johns
Hopkins as a center of gifted education and research, went ahead and
administered in 1969 to an 8th-grade math whiz he had heard was not
only excelling in a summer computer course at Hopkins but also helping
graduate students. Joe aced the math portion. It emerged that among
children under 13 who scored in the very highest percentiles on
grade-level standardized tests, there were some who could match or
outperform the average high-school senior SAT-taker, particularly on
the math section, but also on the verbal section and sometimes on
both. The SAT could thus be used as a device for winnowing the top and
tiptop performers in specific areas very early. With the help of
colleagues, Stanley inaugurated the Johns Hopkins talent search and
began gathering subjects for the second-most-famous longitudinal
gifted study: the continuing Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth
(SMPY), which includes a superselect cohort of students who scored 700
or above on the math or the verbal section before turning 13 (a feat
performed by 1 in 10,000 children, those the Davidsons and others
label "profoundly gifted"). Intervention was Stanley's real goal, and
acceleration - not mere enrichment - became his mission, which meant
packing the earliest SMPY phenoms off to college very young. Soon
Johns Hopkins had started intensive summer programs where students
could devour whole-year math courses, and before long literature
classes too, in mere weeks. The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented
Youth model caught on. Stanley helped start centers at Duke and
Northwestern, and there are now programs as well at the University of
Denver, the University of Iowa and Vanderbilt University.
"The idea that we should try to make a universal man out of one person
isn't appealing to me somehow," Stanley once said, not sharing
Terman's interest in the omnibus genius. Instead he and his team
emphasized a more specialized vision: to spot children's narrower
talent as linguistic or numerical "symbol analyzers" and, by
supporting it early and intensively, help spur them on to excel in
that field as adults. It is an endeavor, they have pointed out, right
in step with the spirit of the information age that was dawning as the
SMPY unfolded. What began as a regional talent search has become
national, annually testing nearly a quarter-million students. Last
year the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth alone recognized about 400
students who scored above 700 on either or both sections - which
suggests the net is quite successful in catching the top kids.
In the SMPY's most select group of high scorers - the 1 in 10,000
cohort - almost all have enjoyed some form of academic acceleration,
and Stanley's hope of orchestrating self-fulfilling prophecies so far
seems mostly to have panned out. Early adolescent math or verbal
trajectories are borne out in about two-thirds of the cases, with the
notable exception that high verbal males are as likely to pursue an
undergraduate degree in the sciences as in the humanities and arts.
Advanced degrees are far more common in this SMPY group than in the
general population. Participants also more often receive tenure and
take out patents, cited as evidence that the SAT measures "much more
than book-learning potential." As SMPY researchers await the analysis
of data on the cohort at age 50, it is worth noting their scaled-down
accomplishment. They have created what amounts to effective early
career-profiling - an instrumental goal rather different from the
inspirational visions of their predecessors. Where Hollingworth sought
cultural "originations" from her highest I.Q. cohort (not just
cultural "conservation"), the new mission is to answer the need for
"human-capital specialization" by fine-tuning and facilitating
particular expertise earlier and faster.
It is hard to say what might have become of these already high-scoring
middle schoolers had they never sat for the SAT and enjoyed summer
courses and been anointed as extra-special. Stanley and his associates
have not aspired to conduct a rigorously controlled experiment. They
do like to claim, though, that if they had been in charge, the future
Nobel laureates Shockley and Alvarez would have made the cut. What
they neglect to note is that the two of them didn't need finding. It
is interesting, though, to wonder what difference, if any, it might
have made to Shockley's career had his alternately domineering and
indulgent mother received guidance in rearing her brilliant but
obnoxious son. And who knows what might have happened had Shockley
received an early (nonmaternal) imprimatur of promise and a chance to
mingle with brilliant peers - rather than the insult, which reportedly
rankled him all his life, of scoring too low (129) to qualify for the
Terman study. Might he have avoided his late-life notoriety? Or is it
conceivable that he might not have helped invent the transistor at
all?
There is no predicting the fate of the fellows anointed by the
Davidson Institute over the past five years, and of course the award
itself is just one identity-marking moment for them. But the emergence
of this junior MacArthur grant at the turn of the millennium points up
the persistent tensions in talent development. On the one hand, it is
worth wondering whether the inflated rhetoric of adult approval might
prove a burden of sorts for children who are already much lauded. Leta
Hollingworth advised long ago against placing highly gifted children
"in a position which will be a constant stimulus to live up to the
role of child prodigy" and warned against overusing "genius," a term
generally understood to imply domain-altering powers no child can
possibly yet have. Confidence is a crucial ingredient of success in
carving out a distinctive path, but too many early plaudits can
undermine risk-taking and drive. Outsize external expectations can
also be daunting for precocious learners and performers as they make
the maturational leap from the work of mastering rules and skills to
the challenge of asserting more self-conscious control of their gifts.
On the other hand, the Davidsons' revival of the reverent terminology
is a reminder that precocious accomplishments are wondrous in
themselves: the monumental efforts and results children are capable of
can be amazing, never mind what those children may (or may not) go on
to become. These are awards for hard-earned achievement, not for
test-taking ability or abstract potential, Jan Davidson emphasizes as
she explains why she feels it is appropriate for the fellows to speak
to the press and be saluted by senators and congressmen. By the same
token, she doesn't want to see public attention drawn to the other
lucky beneficiaries of the Institute's help, the 750 Young Scholars,
who are selected merely "for being smart, a God-given gift." The
arduous fellowship application (which asks about the labors and
mentors involved, and the social significance envisaged) is wisely
geared to older adolescents: despite the talk of "prodigies," only 3
of this year's 17 are younger than 16. In Washington, effusions over
the fellows' precocious promise and polish are offset by an emphasis
on their persistence and their initiative in seeking out guidance -
surely a better identity than "genius" for kids with, let's hope, lots
of exploratory stumbling ahead of them.
At the evening reception in the Library of Congress, John Zhou and the
other dark-suited teenage scientists seemed to be in their element,
chatting over the hors d'oeuvres as if they were veterans of public
events like this - which the handsome Lucas Moller, who was clearly
practiced at answering lay inquiries, gave every sign of being.
Moller, a 17-year-old from Moscow, Idaho, has been researching Mars
dust ever since fifth grade, when at the suggestion of his scientist
father he submitted an entry to a NASA-sponsored school contest and
won. It was the beginning of a relationship with a NASA mentor, which
has led him on to other related projects and assorted conferences. The
basic pattern proved to be common. Entering competitions and finding
internships or connections, governmental or academic: from Stephanie
Hon (working on Alzheimer's) to Milana Zaurova (studying malignant
brain cancer), nearly every science/technology fellow had a similar
tale of closely mentored opportunity to tell in the morning
discussions that the Davidsons videotaped for clips to quote from when
they lecture. It was not quite grist for the "genius denied" paradigm:
if schools couldn't offer direct help, no fellow said schools actively
stood in the way.
In fact, with all the enabling institutions, it was sometimes hard to
tell exactly where and how the young scientists' drives originated.
Over lunch, John Zhou's mother - whose husband left China after
Tiananmen Square, with her following later - confessed that she had
despaired that her bored sixth grader's energy was disappearing into
computer games, only to be reassured when she succeeded in redirecting
it into Web design, and he became a whirlwind of accomplishment (even
setting up a site for a branch of his city's library). "I don't know
if I was going to fall through the cracks, like my mother said," John
said with a laugh. He was more inclined to credit the example of other
purposeful kids as the real catalyst for his many endeavors. As a
group, the scientific fellows are definitely not lacking in passion,
the galvanic trait everyone invokes these days, including the
Davidsons and the fellows themselves. Bob and Jan astutely pressed the
kids to also discuss their frustrations - a darker side of intense
commitment that too often gets left out, notes Felice Kaufmann, a
psychologist who has been following up on a similar group, called the
Presidential Scholars. The young scientists obliged. Stephanie Hon,
for example, was crushed to think six weeks of research had been in
vain, only to discover that a computer glitch accounted for her
nonresults - "the best of both worlds," as she put it, "taste the
failure but still have the success." No one could say these fellows
lack tenacity. What they wouldn't be confused with, though, is that
figure of lab lore, the unkempt obsessive pursuing the experiment
everybody says is fruitless, or the kid outdoors absorbed for hours
watching insects. These are well-connected youths with timely projects
- security devices and computer innovations, as well as urgent
diseases - who have kept very busy excelling at a well-tailored array
of other interests as well, from the saxophone to ballroom dancing and
the Boy Scouts.
The musician fellows did not blend in quite so effortlessly that
evening, since two of the four of them looked rather young to be
mingling at a reception in such an elegant setting: Marc Yu, who plays
the cello in addition to the piano, and the 12-year-old Karsten Gimre,
also a pianist (as well as a sophomore at Pacific University in Forest
Grove, Ore., majoring in math and physics). When it comes to "true"
prodigies, preadolescents with spectacular abilities, the Davidson
Institute follows the historical pattern of finding them mainly in the
realm of music. In publicly touting the very young performers as
prodigies, the Institute steps into an ongoing debate. For at least a
quarter century now, there has been "a benevolent conspiracy" among
influential musical figures to fend off burnout by trying to foster "a
more humanistic, nonexploitative approach to the development of
talent," as the writer Marie Winn put it in a New York Times Magazine
article in 1979. What a researcher named Jeanne Bamberger has termed a
"midlife" crisis seems to occur for prodigious young musicians: a
transitional period of cognitive and emotional maturation during which
only some performers manage to move beyond intuitive imitation to a
more reflective sense of direction. Parents must carve out space for
precocious players to "have a childhood. . .an adolescence," according
to influential figures like Itzhak Perlman; resist the pressure, they
urge, to "get management" and a packed schedule of practice and
performance.
Yet pressure also unavoidably goes with the terrain of musical
promise. After all, even if most musicians with phenomenal early
talent won't emerge as great
mature artists, the stars of the future will surely have been young
phenomenons. Marc's mother is well aware of that - and knows that
constructive practice at Marc's age requires an adult at his side. So
does Marc, who appreciates how much work his idols Yo-Yo Ma and Lang
Lang devoted to honing the technique that no virtuoso can do without.
The message for kids that Marc passed on in his session with the
Davidsons will no doubt be their most used quotation. "You should play
Game Boy less," he said in his slightly lisping cadence, "and you
should practice more." Marc's cello teacher understandably worries
about all the attention (he has been on "The Tonight Show" and
"Oprah"), yet this bubbly boy who can bear down on his music with
undaunted intensity seems proof of the pleasure - never mind future
fame - this kind of driven focus can bring.
Karsten, who by age 6 had already placed first in the International
Young Artists Concert at the Kennedy Center, couldn't help casting
more of a shadow with his listlessness in his morning session with the
Davidsons. To their opening question about how he got started on the
piano, he quietly replied: "Actually, I didn't want to do it. My
mother wanted me to have something to do when I was older. And then I
liked it." Asked at the end about what lay ahead, he said, "I really
don't know what I'm doing," adding with a sigh that he would "just
graduate in math and physics." By then it had become clear that
Karsten, even before facing any subtle maturational challenges of
adolescence, had run into a physical obstacle: elbow tendonitis had
forced a hiatus in his playing, he said, and now his wrist hurt.
Though he is feeling better, it was the kind of setback that could
well leave a phenomenal performer sounding temporarily adrift.
As the Library of Congress reception was breaking up, the literary
laureate was standing off to the side, feeling "very weird," she
commented. Heidi Kaloustian, the only fellow in literature, hastened
to say she had "great respect for science," but the evening had
brought home to her just what a different place she was in from the
young researchers. A professional path seemed to open out before them,
with scientific papers already in the works for some, patent
possibilities in view for others, further lab options surely ahead for
all. Almost as if in sisterly solidarity, Maia Cabeza, the lone girl
musician, came up to ask Heidi eagerly whether her portfolio - which,
along with her poetry, contains a striking trio of fictional portraits
of female coming-of-age ordeals in other cultures - was going to be
published. Trying not to sound too appalled, Heidi answered: "I
wouldn't dream of trying. I have so much more to learn." Heidi
confided that the fellowship, though hugely welcome, has also been
daunting. "I have to top something when I'm not even sure how I did
it." It is not that she lacked teachers; she felt indebted to one in
particular, and had a fabulous summer with other artistic kids at the
Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan. Her spirited mother, an avid reader
and nurse, who, instead of whisking her daughters to a round of
activities, made sure they had lots of time with books, clearly has
inspired confidence in her daughter. Still, to have an imagination
like Heidi's is to be aware of how mysterious the future twists and
turns may be (and how rarely $50,000 drops down on struggling
writers).
Unexpectedly, given that nonverbal brilliance is popularly associated
with an aura of weirdness, it is the Davidson Fellows outside the
realms of math, science and technology who look quirky by comparison,
kids who have embarked on sometimes unwieldy projects that propel them
they are not quite sure where. With criteria far less clear-cut in the
nonquantitative fields, the institute's judges (who are anonymous) are
evidently eager to reward reach and a degree of intellectual
nonconformity, and on one occasion extreme youth: a 10-year-old named
Alexandra Morris received a fellowship for her literary work. (There
is even an "outside the box" category, though so far no winners.) The
first year of the fellowships, 2001, 15-year-old Daniel Ohrenstein was
awarded for tackling "The Endeavor of Seeing the Essential Nature of
Existence," a series of rather woolly philosophical lectures that
Ohrenstein, now an engineering major, says he shies from rereading
since he has become a convert to "clear thinking" and "vowed never to
use the words 'everything' and 'nothing' again." That same year,
16-year-old Rachel Emery says she was rescued by the Davidson award
she won for an existential-fantasy novella written in what her mother
calls the depths of depression. An eclectic energy has fueled her
subsequent course through Simon's Rock, an experimental college
designed for high-school-age students, and on to Wellesley, where she
continues to work on several novels and to be, as she puts it,
"constitutionally incapable of attempting anything on a reasonable
scale."
For caution about forecasting and scripting the futures of the highly
gifted, there is no better place to look than the past. History has
plenty of humbling examples, one of them cited by the psychologist
Howard Gruber, who observed that "any fellowship-awards committee
comparing young [Thomas] Huxley's plans when setting out on the voyage
of the Rattlesnake with young Darwin's plans when setting out on the
voyage of the Beagle - both wrote them down in a page or so - would
have given first place to Huxley and put Darwin on the waiting list."
It was precisely Huxley's impressive "hard-edged analytic
objectivism," Gruber speculated, that may have proved a handicap,
where Darwin's vaguer, receptive cast of mind was crucial. "When
someone asked Albert Einstein, 'What is your key to success?' " Dean
Keith Simonton says, his answer was "I'm just curious." Simonton went
on: "How do you cultivate that? It's a hard thing to do." He notes
that Einstein himself "couldn't be mentored, refused to listen to his
teachers, went his own way."
Nobody, of course, expects to handpick the next Einstein. Still, it is
worth remembering that the solicitously individualized "scaffolding"
for the highly gifted that experts currently recommend, and the
pre-professional alacrity that programs like the Hopkins Center for
Talented Youth and the Davidson Fellowships often reward, are
themselves experiments in progress. Look at eminences in the past, and
what stands out in their childhoods is an animus toward school, a
tolerance for solitude and families with lots of books. What also
stands out is families with "wobble" - which means stress and, often,
risk-taking parents with strong opinions - rather than bastions of
supportiveness where a child's giftedness is ever in self-conscious
focus. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics and himself a
prodigy who went to Tufts at 11 and Harvard at 15, wrote that
prodigious children need to develop a "reasonably thick skin" - to
feel they aren't demonized and will find a niche, but not to expect
the world to supply a spotlight. Simonton speaks of the importance of
being able to be "on the failure track for a while, take time off,
take a real risk." Creativity and innovation, he says he is convinced,
depend on "exposure to the unusual, to the diverse, to heterogeneity,"
which inspires a "recognition that there are a lot of different ways
of looking at different things." There are also all kinds of ways that
this "awareness that there's more than one possible world" can dawn.
(The fact that it is built into the immigrant experience is one
reason, on top of an ethos of incredibly hard work, that Simonton says
he believes kids of recently arrived families so often dominate the
ranks of the spectacularly talented.)
No one would recommend throwing more obstacles in highly gifted
children's way. But as experts sound the alarm about the brilliant
minds that aren't being found or are being frustrated, it is some
solace to think that the real geniuses aren't necessarily being
denied. They are biding their time and will take us by surprise.
Ann Hulbert, a contributing writer, is the author of "Raising America:
Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children."
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