The curse of genius
We see exceptional intelligence as a blessing. So why, asks Maggie Fergusson, are so many brilliant children miserable misfits?
By Maggie Fergusson
Tom remembers the day he decided he wanted to be a theoretical astrophysicist. He was deep into research about black holes, and had amassed a box of papers on his theories. In one he speculated about the relationship between black holes and white holes, hypothetical celestial objects that emit colossal amounts of energy. Black holes, he thought, must be linked across space-time with white holes. “I put them together and I thought, oh wow, that works! That’s when I knew I wanted to do this as a job.” Tom didn’t know enough maths to prove his theory, but he had time to learn. He was only five.
Tom is now 11. At home, his favourite way to relax is to devise maths exam papers complete with marking sheets. Last year for Christmas he asked his parents for the £125 registration fee to sit maths GCSE, an exam most children in Britain take at 16. He is currently working towards his maths A-level. Tom is an only child, and at first Chrissie, his mother, thought his love of numbers was normal. Gradually she realised it wasn’t. She would take him to lectures about dark matter at the Royal Observatory in London and notice that there were no other children there. His teacher reported that instead of playing outside with other kids at breaks, he wanted to stay indoors and do sums.
One day his parents took him to Milton Keynes to have his intelligence assessed by an organisation called Potential Plus, formerly the National Association for Gifted Children. “We told him it was a day of puzzles,” Chrissie says. “It was my dream world,” Tom says. “Half a day of tests!” His mother waited while he applied his mind to solving problems. When they were shown the results, Tom’s intelligence put him in the top 0.1% in Britain.
Precocious children are often dismissed as the product of pushy, middle-class parents. Nurture and environment clearly do play an important role in any child’s intellectual development. Talk to your child about politics over the dinner table and he is likely to develop confident opinions about the way the world should be run. Suggest that your toddler think of slices of cake in terms of angles and she may well display an early aptitude for mathematics. Practice can make perfect. The child with a gift for playing the piano who practises five hours a day is more likely to end up performing at Carnegie Hall than the equally gifted one who plays for just 20 minutes a week.
But children like Tom are different. He was brought up in an underprivileged part of south London: 97% of pupils at his first school didn’t speak English as a first language. When it comes to numbers – or his other passions such as Latin and astrophysics – Tom’s parents have little idea what he’s talking about. His genius is not of their engineering.
Intelligence tests are marked “on a curve”, meaning that the results are transformed into a bell curve: what matters is how you do compared with others who take them. By definition, most scores bunch in the middle: the average result in a cohort becomes an intelligence quotient (IQ) of 100; the middle two-thirds of scores become IQs of 85 to 115. The outliers are few. About two people in 100 have IQs below 70, and another two have IQs above 130. By the time you get 45 points away from the average of 100 in either direction, you’re down to about one person in 1,000. But since only a small percentage of any population takes IQ tests, identifying very exceptional children is hard. Most schools have none.
Tom finds it hard to relate to other children and has few friends. At school he has been shunted out on his own into corridors and offices. “They didn’t want him in the class because he’s doing different stuff,” Chrissie says. To distract his mind from “dark thoughts”, Tom turns to puzzles and calculations, often late at night. He has long suffered from insomnia. The strain affects the whole family: “I don’t understand parents who seek this,” says Chrissie. “I can’t cope with it. I just want to take it away.”
Many others echo the pain of Tom and his family. Mensa, an international organisation founded in Britain in 1946 to nurture the country’s most intelligent people, has 20,000 members (you must apply to join). When I put out a request via Mensa to hear from gifted children and their parents, my inbox fills with emails, many of them anguished. Those that I speak to say that, for fear of inspiring jealousy, they don’t dare talk to others about their children’s abilities. Given a sympathetic ear, they pour out their woes at such length that I nearly despair of getting them off the phone. Almost all are afraid of being identified, and insist on fake names.
Some countries value extremely high intelligence more than others and offer specific educational provision for such children. Yet even if your genius is prized, admired and cultivated, social and psychological issues that often accompany great ability may make it an unwelcome gift. From the inside – and for many families that I spoke to – genius can feel more like a curse than a blessing.
Most experts reserve the term “gifted” for children who demonstrate three characteristics. First, gifted children begin to master a particular discipline – a language, maths or chess – much younger than most. They do so easily, so they also progress much faster than their peers.
Secondly, this mastery is achieved largely on their own, rather than as a result of parental prodding. A child’s surroundings and socio-economic background certainly affect their speed of development: there is a close correlation between the number of words a child’s parents have spoken to them by the time they’re three and the child’s academic success aged nine. Studies suggest that children born into professional families may have heard some 4m more words by then than the offspring of parents with lower educational backgrounds. Such families often have higher incomes to provide more educational opportunities too.
But Lyn Kendall, a consultant on gifted children at Mensa – who was herself a gifted child in a working-class family – insists that reading Nietzsche to your five-year-old, or forcing them to do three hours of extra homework, cannot “make” a genius.
Many children who have extremely high IQs show signs of extraordinary ability even as tiny babies, before pushy parenting is able to have much impact. “From a very early age – pre-language – these children understand what is going on around them, understand what people say but cannot respond,” says Kendall. Most toddlers appear to explore the world as they encounter it, distracted by passing cars or the arrival of a new toy. By contrast, Kendall describes gifted children of that age as “driven”: “They never stop and they set themselves incredibly high standards.” We often associate the early years of childhood with taking joy in simple things, living in the present and an inability to think through the consequences of actions. Instead, says Kendall, watching gifted toddlers, “it’s almost as if someone has taken an 18-year-old and put them in a newborn body.”
A third characteristic of gifted children is that their interests often seem near-obsessive. They have what is sometimes called “a rage to master”. Jesse is five. When he was one and crawling, his father Richard tells me, he would do anything to avoid having his nappy changed. “We found that the only way we could keep him still was to give him things to take apart and put back together again. We had a yellow torch with a built-in bulb, and he would take the battery out, put it back in, and test whether it worked. If he’d put the battery in the wrong way round, he’d persevere until he got it right.”
The first IQ tests to measure intelligence were developed by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in the early 20th century. They evaluated short-term memory, analytical thinking and mathematical ability. Though the tests have changed since then, the basic skills they attempt to measure have remained the same. Within a few points either way, IQ is fixed throughout your life: the only way you’ll lose it is because of a brain injury.
So-called “intelligence” tests abound online. Many children take aptitude tests at school. Most of these can be gamed or, at least, children can be trained to excel at them. Mensa does its best to make its tests “culture fair” – in other words it aims to identify intelligence that is intrinsic rather than taught. “The original gifted children will have invented the wheel and discovered fire,” says Kendall. But even Kendall, who is in the business of evaluating children, admits that “testing IQ is not like measuring height”. No assessment is completely objective.
Most tests look only at particular types of intelligence, such as mathematical and verbal reasoning. That reflects how narrow society’s notions of giftedness are. Many other types of skill and characteristics are missed, such as voracious curiosity or the ability to make intellectual connections. The tests are unlikely to identify future novelists or poets, or children who may be exceptionally good at sports or music. We don’t yet have a way to measure creative, artistic or emotional intelligence. The sorts of children we rate as “geniuses” tend to be only those who fall into the standard categories.
Some people question the very notion of giftedness. The definition of a gifted child has fragmented over time, says Deborah Eyre, founder of High Performance Learning, an organisation that works with schools and teachers in Britain to try to help large numbers of children become “high performers”. She does not see aptitude as innate. Eyre says that no matter where you look in the world, the children of wealthy parents are over-represented in cohorts of gifted children. Those who come from minority backgrounds are under-represented: “Latinos don’t get selected [for programmes] in the US, Maoris don’t in New Zealand.”
She also says that what marks out brilliant and high-achieving children – and adults – is often determination. The difference between two equally talented physicists, one who goes on to win a Nobel prize and one who does not, is their will to succeed. Apparent genius, she argues, is a combination of some kind of potential, along with the right support and personal drive.
Eyre claims that a certain type of parent, usually a highly educated one, takes pride in having a “gifted child” to show off. But this view wasn’t borne out by the parents I spoke to, most of whom found their children’s gifts to be a source of anxiety, even distress.
Many of these parents face two main difficulties. One is how to cater to the advanced intellectual development of their child. The second dimension is more rarely voiced but may cause just as many problems: exceptionally intelligent children are often socially isolated, even disruptive. Gifts that are admired in the abstract often seem less welcome in person.
If you were to meet Ophelia Gregory, you’d think that the good fairies must have clustered around her cradle. Now 17, she is willowy and beautiful, with deep-green eyes. Her family – mother Kerry, father Tom and three younger brothers – is close and loving. At the age of 12, Ophelia clocked 162 in Mensa’s IQ test. It is the highest possible score for someone under 18, and on a level with Stephen Hawking, the ground-breaking cosmologist who died last year.
Yet so far, extraordinary intelligence has brought Ophelia little happiness. For her, being categorised as “gifted” is simply “more trouble than it’s worth”. She has been bullied and changed schools several times. I wonder what Kerry would say to a parent longing for a gifted child? “I’d say, ‘It should be a great thing, but it’s not. It never will be.’”
A gifted child may have an advanced ability to master something like maths, but more limited capacity to deal with their social environment which is another important part of growing up and fitting in over the course of their lives. “A gifted child might be prone to complete social meltdowns,” says Anguera. “They can’t understand how other children work, and they can’t control their emotions.” Being exceptionally able in some areas means they need “the right support” in others, she says.
In the early 20th century American psychologist Leta Hollingworth talked about “socially optimal intelligence”, which she associated with an IQ of between 125 and 155. Ratchet the score beyond that, and what Norman Geschwind, an American behavioural neurologist, termed a “pathology of superiority” can creep in: the dominance of one bit of the brain can affect the development of other parts.
We don’t yet know why this is, or whether it’s down to nature, nurture or both. One study shows that among members of Mensa in America, the rate of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is almost twice that diagnosed in the general population. Others argue that because some gifted children are so different from their peers at school, and may interact little with them in the classroom, they may do so less in the playground too. Though in some ways their aptitudes are very adult, many find themselves unable to play games that we often refer to as “childish”: their social development is more restricted. If an exceptionally able five-year-old spends her free time doing algebra, says Anguera, she often doesn’t want to spend time with a peer who prefers to play with cars. Yet once a child is left out of some social situations, her opportunity to catch up or learn these skills diminishes.
Kendall identifies several characteristics common among gifted children who have no identified behavioural disorders. One trait is that many of them are deeply anxious, usually as a result of over-thinking everything. “Your brain has the capacity to work out all the variables,” she explains, “so it inevitably does.” Hilary emailed me about her son, Lorenzo: “I am finding it increasingly difficult to cope with his heightened emotion and anxiety.” Lorenzo, now 12, became a member of Mensa two years ago and so has opportunities to mix with other very bright kids both in person and online. Lorenzo scored 162 in his IQ test (“Same as Einstein,” Hilary tells me. I don’t have the heart to tell her that Einstein never had his IQ measured). He worries incessantly: “Waiting for a flight to Hong Kong recently, he asked so many questions about what might go wrong with the plane that the waiting hall cleared around us.”
The sleeping pattern of such children often differs from the norm: switching off their brains can be very difficult. The mother of one gifted child told me that he didn’t sleep for more than 90 minutes at a stretch until he was nearly five.
The emotional and physical health associations with genius don’t stop there. The American branch of Mensa, which has more than 50,000 members, refers to its affiliates as having “hyper brains”. A recent survey of its members suggested that people with exceptionally high intelligence very often have what Kazimierz Dabrowski, a Polish psychologist, dubs “over-excitabilities” or “super-sensibilities”, such as a heightened awareness of one of the five senses, experiencing extremely intense emotions or having very high levels of energy. Among these individuals, the incidence of depression, anxiety and ADHD is higher than in the average population.
Giftedness may even be linked with physiological conditions such as food allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases, which sometimes go hand-in-hand with “sensory processing disorder”. For many exceptionally intelligent individuals, everyday stimuli such as a radio playing in the background, the colour or texture of food, a vibrant display on a classroom wall or a scratchy label in a piece of clothing can become almost unbearable. Because his brain function is so acute, Lorenzo’s senses are more than usually finely tuned, believes Hilary. “He can hear things that we can’t. He can find it impossible to do his homework in a room that would seem to most people completely silent.”
“Neurologically, high IQ goes with increased efficiency in neural functioning,” says Sonja Falck, a psychotherapist in Britain who works almost exclusively with clients of “extreme intelligence”. “That’s measurable,” continues Falck. “If a person is getting a lot of stimulation and processing it very quickly, they are susceptible to being over-stimulated.”
Many gifted children struggle with failure. The trouble, Kendall explains, is that if you’re known for being a brainbox you don’t have to try, and so don’t build up resilience. She works with many bright children who “won’t put pen to paper”. At workshops she runs for gifted children, the kids sometimes play Twister, a game where players contort themselves over a mat covered with coloured dots. “They’re in hysterics,” Kendall says. “You can’t get it right so you’re teaching them to do something just for the joy of it.”
Rebecca’s daughter Lizzie is five. She was conceived with donor sperm and her biological father had three degrees. Ahead of her first birthday she was using whole sentences. She completed a puzzle with 48 pieces in which she had to match pictures to the corresponding words at 16 months. By her second birthday she could recite “The Gruffalo”, a 24-page children’s story written in rhyme; when Rebecca forgot her face-cloth at bath time, Lizzie chided, “Mummy, you are an abomination!” Aged three, she announced, “Mummy, I’m not pretty. It’s my chromosomes’ fault.” But like many gifted children, she can become distraught if she gets things wrong. “Some days I feel sorry for her,” says Rebecca. “I just want her to be as normal as possible.”
That is difficult. Ahead of play dates, Rebecca clears away Lizzie’s toys so that the other mothers can’t see how advanced she is. People look for gifted children to fail, says Rebecca, “I’ve learned to cover for Lizzie.” Rebecca teaches children with special needs, but says that for her daughter’s particular needs “there’s nothing”.
Sonja Falck is wary of the word “gifted” because “it connotes privilege”, in that the gifted person is seen as having an advantage over everyone else. But it’s not necessarily an advantage. “Someone who is gifted, but who grows up in an environment that is not supportive, can really suffer. This suffering is hugely under-acknowledged.” Falck tells me about a client of hers who had an abortion: she couldn’t bear the idea of giving birth to a child who might suffer for her “gifts” as she had.
Emily’s son Peter is nine. Since he was tiny he has preferred adult company to that of his peers: “At nursery, he used to sob all morning,” says Emily. Physically fragile and a loner, he has ended up in hospital three times after being beaten up at school. In common with many gifted children he has difficulty eating because he is hyper-sensitive to food textures. But for Peter, as for many other children, the greatest problem is that humdrum, day-to-day life is so hard to deal with. He finds school crushingly dull. His head teacher doesn’t see that this is a problem. “A bit of boredom is quite good for you,” he told Emily.
But boredom can be torture. A gifted student needs a fraction of the hours to master aGCSE subject that the school curriculum typically devotes to that subject, suggests Falck. She compares it to a seasoned runner being forced every day to trudge in step with people who walk extremely slowly.
How best to educate a gifted child? The challenges are complex and often competing. On the one hand they are able to master material sooner and more rapidly than their peers. On the other, because the social skills of many such children are poorly developed, it can be extremely difficult for them to be a child in the traditional sense, to fit in and to learn many of the non-verbal, non-testable skills that social activity teaches you in preparation for being an adult. And without meaning to, such children may come across as smart-arses who, even with the best of intentions, other kids and adults may simply not wish to be around. Adults, especially teachers, may find extremely clever children threatening: a small child talking to you as an equal can put you on the back foot. They literally know more than the adults around them and can’t help but tell them so.
After Tom’s assessment at Potential Plus, Chrissie sought advice on how best to educate him. It was obvious to her that his south-London primary school couldn’t cope. Apart from his first teacher at the school, whom Tom describes as “incredible” and who encouraged his interest in maths by sitting with him during break times to work through problems, his other teachers seemed to hate him. One appeared to enjoy belittling him, announcing to the class that “Tom found maths hard today,” while neglecting to mention that he was doing work meant for children ten years older than him.
Chrissie was told she had two options: she could either home-school Tom or send him to a private school that could give him more individual attention. Both ideas horrified her. She disagreed with home-schooling on principle – surely it would exacerbate his feeling of isolation. Private school was beyond the family’s financial means, but Tom received a bursary and now attends a respected, selective school in London, where the annual fees are £20,000. He still struggles to relate to other kids, and finds the economic disparity between him and his fellow pupils shocking. But he finds the teaching more stimulating. “I do like her, and she has given me harder work,” he says of his maths teacher.
Debate rages about the wisdom of accelerating children out of their age group. If they are moved up, they may struggle socially. If they stay down, they may switch off intellectually. Students need social and psychological support, says Leonie Kronborg of the University of Monash in Australia. She points to programmes for gifted adolescents like the Early Entrance Programme at the University of Washington in America: young teenagers can begin studying at university as part of a group of similarly advanced people their own age, so they are intellectually stimulated but keep socialising with their peers.
Faced with sons and daughters who are bored and miserable at school, many parents of gifted children opt to take things into their own hands. Chrissie’s fears aside, home-schooling is surprisingly common for gifted children of highly educated parents. In the mid-1980s a father and daughter, Harry and Ruth Lawrence, made a striking pair, travelling around Oxford on a tandem bicycle. Harry had given up his career in computing and home-educated Ruth since she was five; at 12 she won a place to study maths at Oxford University. Harry accompanied Ruth to all her lectures, making sure that she never “wasted” time by socialising with other young people. She now works as a respected – but not outstanding – mathematician. When she had her first child, she vowed not to push him to move any faster academically than he wanted to.
Some countries have cultivated an educational environment that is welcoming to gifted children. Singapore runs a highly selective programme designed to identify the most exceptionally intelligent students each year. At the age of eight or nine all children are assessed in maths, English and reasoning. The top 1% are transferred from “normal” classes to the Gifted Education Programme which is run in nine primary schools up to the age of 12. They can then choose whether to attend certain secondary schools that offer such classes. Selected children get “personalised education plans” that include teaching on particular topics in greater depth and breadth, access to additional self-taught online courses, placement in higher classes for specific subjects, and early admission to primary school for very young children. But emphasising educational attainment has proved controversial. Since 2007, there have been efforts to increase socialisation between children of different abilities.
Such an approach reflects a very traditional idea of intelligence – using certain types of tests to identify children with apparently innate intellectual abilities. Elsewhere educationalists are using a broader range of methods to spot highly intelligent children and increasing their focus on attitudes and personality traits often found in the most successful people – the drive, for instance, that Deborah Eyre talks about. In Project Bright Idea, a programme at Duke University in North Carolina, 10,000 ordinary nursery and primary-school children were taught using methods usually applied to the cleverest kids – fostering high expectations, encouraging complex problem-solving and developing meta-cognition (“thinking about thinking”). Nearly all of them went on to do much better in tests than their comparable peers.
What will become of Tom and Ophelia, Lizzie, Lorenzo and Peter? Raj Chetty, an American economist at Harvard University has calculated that those who score in the top 5% of standard tests at primary school are many times more likely than the other 95% to file patents as adults – and that probability is far higher among bright kids from rich families. Whatever their natural talents, children whose aptitudes are nurtured and given opportunities have a far better chance in life.
But gifted children do not necessarily shine later on. Some are what Chetty refers to as “lost Einsteins”: children who weren’t given an outlet for their intelligence or the encouragement to stretch their intellect, or who needed help to deal with the isolation of their experience. There are those whose abilities are missed by the limitations of IQ tests. And there are the many exceptional children who face barriers in later years because they never developed the interpersonal skills needed to succeed in the workplace or the wider world of social activity.
In the 1920s Lewis Terman, an American psychologist, studied 1,500 children with very high intelligence. Others followed up that group 70 years later. They found that they had accomplished no more than their socio-economic status would have predicted. One child Terman excluded as not bright enough, William Shockley, had co-invented the transistor and won the Nobel prize in physics.
And an unhappy childhood stays with you. Kim Ung-yong was a child prodigy in South Korea. Now a civil engineer in his 50s, he feels he was cheated of a childhood. He began speaking at six months and had mastered four languages by the age of two. He gained his first PhD aged eight, and was then headhunted to work for NASA. “I led my life like a machine,” he has said. “I woke up, solved the daily assigned equation, ate, slept…I was lonely and had no friends.” Even Albert Einstein, one of the most emblematic examples of genius, wrote in 1952: “It is strange to be known so universally and yet be so lonely.”
That’s a bleak message for the child geniuses of today. Looking to the future, Tom’s mum Chrissie doesn’t seem hopeful. “Show me a story of a child like this which ends well,” she says. “They don’t exist.” Then she turns to Tom reassuringly. “Maybe you will be the first.”■
You’re not as smart as you think you are
Human cleverness arises from distributing knowledge between minds, making people think they know more than they do
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. By Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. Riverhead; 296 pages; $28. Macmillan; £18.99.
DO YOU know how a toilet works? What about a bicycle, or a zipper? Most people can provide half answers at best. They struggle to explain basic inventions, let alone more complex and abstract ones. Yet somehow, in spite of people’s ignorance, they created and navigate the modern world. A new book, “The Knowledge Illusion” sets out to tackle this apparent paradox: how can human thinking be so powerful, yet so shallow?
Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, two cognitive scientists, draw on evolutionary theory and psychology. They argue that the mind has evolved to do the bare minimum that improves the fitness of its host. Because humans are a social species and evolved in the context of collaboration, wherever possible, abilities have been outsourced. As a result, people are individually rather limited thinkers and store little information in their own heads. Much knowledge is instead spread through the community—whose members do not often realise that this is the case.
The hive mind, with its seamless interdependence and expertise-sharing, once helped humans hunt mammoths and now sends them into space. But in politics it causes problems. Using a toilet without understanding it is harmless, but changing the health-care system without understanding it is not. Yet people often have strong opinions about issues they understand little about. And on social media, surrounded by like-minded friends and followers, opinions are reinforced and become more extreme. It is hard to reason with someone under the illusion that their beliefs are thought through, and simply presenting facts is unlikely to change beliefs when those beliefs are rooted in the values and groupthink of a community.
The authors tentatively suggest that making people confront the illusion of understanding will temper their opinions, but this could have the opposite effect—people respond badly to feeling foolish. Messrs Sloman and Fernbach show how deep the problem runs, but are short on ideas to fix it.
How and why to search for young Einsteins
New research suggests new ways to nurture gifted children
EVERY year in Singapore 1% of pupils in the third year of primary school bring home an envelope headed “On government service”. Inside is an invitation to the city-state’s Gifted Education Programme. To receive the overture, pupils must ace tests in maths, English and “general ability”. If their parents accept the offer, the children are taught using a special curriculum.
Singapore’s approach is emblematic of the traditional form of “gifted” education, one that uses intelligence tests with strict thresholds to identify children with seemingly innate ability. Yet in many countries it is being overhauled in two main ways. The first is that educationists are using a broader range of methods to identify highly intelligent children, especially those from poor households. The second is an increasing focus on fostering the attitudes and personality traits found in successful people in an array of disciplines—including those who did not ace intelligence tests.
New research lies behind these shifts. It shows that countries which do not get the most from their best and brightest face big economic costs. The research also suggests that the nature-or-nurture debate is a false dichotomy. Intelligence is highly heritable and perhaps the best predictor of success. But it is far from the only characteristic that matters for future eminence.
The study of gifted children goes back at least a century. In 1916 Leta Hollingworth—a psychologist whose doctorate refuted the idea that women struggled at science because of destabilising menstrual cycles—began some of the earliest research on children with high IQs. Two decades later she started work at the Speyer School in New York City, one of the first schools with a challenging curriculum for these pupils.
Like, really smart
IQ tests have attracted furious criticism. Speaking for the sceptics, Christopher Hitchens, a journalist, argued that: “There is…an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and [his] propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ.” Like any assessment, IQ tests are not perfect. But as Stuart Ritchie of the University of Edinburgh points out in “Intelligence”, researchers in cognitive science agree that general intelligence—not book-learning but the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly and so on—is an identifiable and important attribute which can be measured by IQ tests.
Just how important is suggested by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), founded in 1971. Julian Stanley, then a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, over 25 years recruited 5,000 precocious children, each of whom had intelligence-test scores in early adolescence high enough to gain entry to university.
Research into how these children did in adulthood has emerged over the past two decades. Of the SMPY participants who scored among the top 0.5% for their age-group in maths and verbal tests, 30% went on to earn a doctorate, versus 1% of Americans as a whole. These children were also much more likely to have high incomes and to file patents.
There is variation even among the top scorers (see chart). This runs contrary to the idea, proposed by some psychologists, that there is a ceiling to IQ, after which its influence wanes. Of the top 0.01% of children, 50% went on to earn a PhD, medical or law degree.
Findings from studies led by Ian Deary of the University of Edinburgh, meanwhile, undermine the idea that gifted children go on to become disproportionately troubled. There are of course exceptions. But on average having a high IQ as a child is associated with better physical and mental health as an adult. Being moved up a school-year, as many are, tends to do them little harm. SMPY pupils who skipped at least one grade were 60% more likely to file patents than those who did not.
Officials often cite the SMPY as the inspiration for the creation in 2014 of two specialist maths schools in England. Based on the Kolmogorov School in Moscow, these schools accept only those pupils who excel in maths at exams at age 16. In January the government said it wanted to open more as part of its “industrial strategy”, a plan to boost Britain’s woeful productivity growth. Linking gifted education to economic growth may horrify some people. But it has long seemed like common sense in countries without many natural resources, such as Singapore.
Sadly, however, the potential of poor bright children is often wasted. In December Raj Chetty of Stanford University and colleagues published a paper lamenting “lost Einsteins”. They found that children who score in the top 5% of standardised tests in the third year of primary school are many times more likely than the other 95% to file patents in later life. But the likelihood is still much greater among smart kids from rich families.
Philippe Aghion of the London School of Economics and colleagues found similar results in Finland. Those with high IQs but from poor backgrounds were especially at risk of not fulfilling their potential. That is not only unfair. It also implies that a lot of talent, which could have been harnessed to cure diseases or design better toasters, is being squandered.
There are many reasons why poor-but-smart children struggle. Yet gifted schemes have often not helped. When applications are voluntary, they come mostly from rich or pushy parents. In New York City, for example, tutoring companies often charge $200 per hour to help four-year-olds prepare for admissions tests for gifted-education programmes starting in kindergarten. Tutoring may temporarily bump up scores by only a few points, but that can make all the difference. In 2015 70% of pupils admitted to such programmes were white or Asian, though they represent just 30% of the school-age population.
It helps when schools test every child, rather than rely on parents to put children forward. In a paper from 2015, economists David Card and Laura Giuliano found that when a school district in Florida introduced universal screening for its gifted-education scheme, admissions increased by 180% among poor children, 130% among Hispanics and 80% for black pupils. (Admissions among white children fell.)
Some programmes go further. Miami-Dade, America’s fourth-largest school district, uses universal screening. It has a lower IQ threshold for poor children or those for whom English is a second language, so long as they show other signs of promise, such as learning English quickly or high scores in other tests. In Miami-Dade 6.9% of black pupils are in the gifted programme, versus 2.4% and 3.6% in Florida as a whole and nationwide respectively.
In America 48 out of 50 states have programmes for brainy children, but in the decade before 2013, 24 redefined them, typically ditching the “gifted” label in favour of “high-ability”. Today no state relies on a single IQ score to select students. In his book “Ungifted” Scott Barry Kaufman of the University of Pennsylvania calls this a “huge change from just 20 years ago”. European countries have seen similar shifts.
School districts are also testing for other attributes, including spatial ability (ie, the capacity to generate, manipulate and store visual images). Jonathan Wai, a psychologist, notes that spatial ability as a child is strongly linked to achievement in science and technology in later life. The Finnish study also found this. But it is less correlated with income during childhood than are verbal and mathematical scores. So testing for it gives talented poor children a better chance to shine, says Mr Wai.
The power of persistence
Other researchers worry, though, that no matter how good the selection process, relying only on measures of intelligence will fail to find children with the potential to excel in adult life. Psychologists such as Mr Kaufman argue that there are many more possible paths to success in adulthood than often assumed, and that education must do more to foster attributes such as passion, determination and creativity.
Whether termed “grit”, “task-motivation” or “conscientiousness”, more psychologists are emphasising the role of persistence. “As much as talent counts, effort counts twice,” writes Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, in “Grit”, published in 2016. For Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, deliberate practice over a long period (popularly understood as 10,000 hours) is critical.
Such statements are simplistic. But few researchers disagree with the idea that talent requires development, and that should involve promoting hard work as well as intelligence. Gifted programmes from Singapore’s to England’s specialist maths schools make it a priority to help children pursue their passion. Robotics prodigies, for example, may be given the opportunity to shadow university students.
There is evidence that aspects of gifted education should influence education more broadly. Project Bright Idea, developed at Duke University, saw 10,000 typical nursery and primary-school pupils taught using methods often reserved for brainier kids—fostering high expectations, complex problem-solving and cultivating meta-cognition (or “thinking about thinking”). Nearly every one of them went on to do much better on tests than similar peers.
Some researchers go further. Carol Dweck of Stanford University emphasises children’s “mindset” (the beliefs they have about learning). Children who think they can change their intelligence have a “growth mindset”, she says. Those who believe they cannot do much to change their “D” grades have a “fixed” one. According to Ms Dweck, children who adopt the first mindset quickly start to do better in tests.
Teaching methods that draw on Ms Dweck’s work are now found in schools across Britain and America. The World Bank is running trials of the approach in countries such as Peru. One technique, for example, might see a pupil told to add the word “yet” to their statements, as in “I can’t do long-division—yet.”
However, a recent meta-analysis suggests that interventions based on growth-mindset are less effective than their hype implies. The study suggests that the effects of interventions drawing on the idea have no effect on the typical student’s outcomes and at best a small effect on those of poorer students. Other psychologists have struggled to replicate Ms Dweck’s results.
The idea that intelligence is highly malleable also jars with research on its heritability. Studies led by Robert Plomin of King’s College London suggest that roughly 50% of the variance in IQ scores is due to genetic differences. These findings do not dismiss the role of nurture; hard work and social background matter. But they undermine the idea that supreme intelligence can simply be willed into being.
A broader approach to gifted education ensures that more children reach their potential. But the evidence suggests that, so long as they are open to everyone, IQ tests still have a vital role to play. To find lost Einsteins, you have to look for them.
