Oliver James 

Hothouse rules

Child prodigies may not become lifetime achievers, even if parents lay down the law, says Oliver James.
  
  


In general, you are more likely to pursue a similar profession to one of your parents, and, if a prodigy, the field is almost always one in which your parents were accomplished, or wished that they had been. They hothouse you through regimes of accelerated learning. A typical example is John Adams, who passed O-levels at age eight and A-levels a year later.

His father, Ken, published a book (sanguinely entitled - since his son was a prodigy, not a genius - Your Child Can Be A Genius) giving a detailed account of the fanatical parenting by which this was achieved. There are numerous mathematical prodigies whose parents even went so far as to move with their pre-pubescent child to a university town so that the studies could be pursued at a higher level.

Although outstanding early ability tends to be presented in the media as a genetic freak, this is probably almost never the case, except perhaps in a handful of isolated skills, like being able to calculate (there are children who for no apparent external reason are able to multiply and divide improbably difficult numbers without blinking). In most domains, there are virtually no authenticated cases of prodigies who came from families in which they were not hothoused or otherwise helped. In the early years the parents go to tremendous lengths to make it abundantly clear that love is conditional on the acquisition of particular skills. Subsequently, no expense is spared to obtain the best possible teaching. Nearly all prodigious modern sportsmen and women, such as the tennis players Venus and Serena Williams, have been obsessively coached from a young age. In the case of the Williams sisters, their father declared his intention of creating world-beaters from the moment of their birth.

Yet childhood prodigy is far from necessarily the precursor of adult genius; in the vast majority of cases it is not. Nor is it about being clever. High marks in intelligence tests do not guarantee lifetime achievement. A famous study of 400 American children with IQs above 140 (the average is 100) found that they did nothing special in later life for people of their social class. None of them became a genius. If anything, the capacity to pass exams or do well at IQ tests may be more a measure of your desire to please parents and teachers than of originality.

When I used to administer IQ tests to children, there was a question along the lines of, 'You are playing with a ball and another child comes and takes it away. What do you do?' Even as young as five, the 'clever' children would be all set to say, 'Thump him!' before fixing me with a beady eye. Then, thinking, 'He obviously doesn't want the true answer, so what's he got in mind?' they'd say, 'I'd tell the teacher.'

The less people-pleasing ones would get nul points for not worrying what I wanted to hear, but it is often from their ranks that truly original creators come.

 

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