These schools to be under a visitor, who is annually to chuse a boy, of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give the?n further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools, of which twenty are proposed to be erected in different parts of the country, for teaching Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1784
OK, so his choice of the words "rubbish" and "residue" may be an inarticulate way to describe nongifted children, but Jefferson's mission is clear: to identify and educate intelligent children in ways that respect their fine minds. And by limiting his search to families too poor to educate their children, Jefferson opens up the doors to excellence by recognizing what his ancient Greek and Chinese counterparts knew centuries earlier: Giftedness can be found in all strata of society
So how exactly is one to identify potential genius? Must we rely solely on the observations of others, who may or may not know a gifted child when they see one? The answer (one answer, at least) lies in what began to happen in the latter half of the 19th century, when interest in intelligence coincided with the advent of a branch of ancient philosophy that became its own science in the 1870s: psychology.
Although educators and psychologists seemed to agree, in principle, on what intelligence looked like, no one was entirely certain that something so amorphous could actually be measured. So, the government of France asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a way to distinguish between children who were educable and those who were not capable of academic advancement. Instead of designing assessments tied in with specific content such as math or reading skills, Binet (and his colleague, Theodore Simon) devised tests that measured qualities such as attention, memory, and judgment—the underlying foundations of learning, if you will. After many test administrations in which children scored at widely varying levels of competence, Binet and Simon established cut-off scores for the following categories of learners: idiots, imbeciles, and normals. These terms were mere descriptors, not carrying the pejorative impact that they do in today's parlance, and thus began an era where children were ranked by a particular test score number—on the Binet-Simon Scale.
Enter Lewis M. Terman. As an undergraduate psychology major at Indiana University in the early 20th century, Terman became interested in the range of intelligence—from "idiot" on up. For his senior seminar project, he wrote two reports: one on mental deficiency and one on superior intelligence. Through this work, Terman became acquainted with the recently published Binet-Simon Scale. Once enrolled in a doctoral program at Clark University, Terman continued to explore the world of intelligence, comparing two groups of boys: those who were "mentally backward" and those who had high intelligence, as measured by the Binet-Simon Scale. In one of his retrospectives, Terman (1954) stated that "the experiment contributed little or nothing to science, but it contributed a lot to my future thinking" (p. 222). That would be an understatement!
Shortly thereafter, while on the faculty at Stanford University, Terman revised the Binet-Simon Scale and, in 1916, published the first Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, an individual test that resulted in an "intelligence quotient"—IQ—that became a measurement prototype so strong that it is still in use today, a century later.
In publishing this test, Terman achieved the "professional cred" he needed to pursue his long-held ambition: to explore the world of exceptional intelligence. So, armed with a grant from the Commonwealth Fund of New York City, he was challenged to locate and study children whose IQ's were in the "genius" range—140 and above. Terman found 1,528 such children—and he continued to follow their educational and life progress for decades, resulting in psychology's most eminent longitudinal study, the five-volume Genetic Studies of Genius.
Much has been written about Terman's legacy, and it is not all positive (Leslie, 2000), as his subjects were predominantly White and middle class, yet he applied his generalizations about intelligence to everyone. As time passed, the identities of some of his "Termites" (as they came to be called) were revealed, including Jess Oppenheimer, creator and writer for I Love Lucy, Edward Drmytryk, a film director whose credits include The Caine Mutiny, and Lee Cronbach, noted psychologist and former President of the American Psychological Association. Hundreds of patents, books, and inventions are credited to this august group of 1,528 and, as Terman (1954) reflected later in his career, "no one developed post-adolescent stupidity" (p. 227). This tongue-in-cheek comment actually is one of Terman's more important findings, as the 19th-century belief in "early ripe, early rot" (i.e., if you use too much of your finite mind too soon, you'll have nothing left: for the later years) was discarded into the bin of false truths. Intelligence, it seems, was a lifelong attribute—gifted once, gifted always.
AND THEN THERE WAS LETA
Thousands of miles away from Stanford, in New York City, another psychologist with an interest similar to Terman's emerged: Leta S. Hollingworth. Beginning her study of gifted children in the same year that the Stanford-Binet was published (1916), Hollingworth did what Terman did not: She examined the intellectual, emotional, and educational lives of the most highly gifted children of all—those whose IQs were above 180.
Her background was as a schoolteacher and principal and, although she eventually received a Ph.D. in psychology, her ties to the classroom were always obvious in her work. In 1922, she convinced the New York City School Board to fund a program for the district's most highly capable children. Years later, in 1937, she became a teacher at Speyer School, P.S. 500, where she worked extensively with children whose IQs ranged from 130-200. In a book that documents her work with these unique young children, Hollingworth (1942) stated that "the minds of these children are occupied primarily with exploration of the world in which they have recently arrived ... This is the golden age of the intellect" (p. 292).
"You'll just have to wait 'til we get there." "Show your work." "Show me the steps each time." "No, you may not work ahead; stay with the class." What is wrong with each of these statements is what troubles public education for gifted learners in America. We should be placing an ever-increasing importance on moving our brightest students ahead by using a pace appropriate to their individual needs—not asking them to wait until others catch up. Sadly, we stifle creativity and eagerness with these "worst practices." Readiness needs to be applied to all. Rethink it, America!
Ruthi Manning-Freeman, public educator since 1975, Breckenridge, CO
What sets Hollingworth's work apart from Terman's can be encapsulated thusly: She believed that to be precocious was to be vulnerable. When children have the intelligence of an adult but the emotions of a child, certain special problems might arise. They include:
- ⟐ problems of play and friendship, as the gifted child's vocabulary, preference for complicated games, and the importance of rules may not be appreciated by less able children of the same age;
- ⟐ problems associated with a lackluster school curriculum, as Hollingworth (1942) believed that children with IQs of 140 waste half their time in school, while those with IQs above 170 spend their time doing "various sorts of bizarre and wasteful activities" (p. 299) under the guise of "learning";
- ⟐ problems in becoming negative toward authority figures, especially when gifted children feel compelled to "make good" the mistakes or misperceptions of adults and are told to "mind their manners" instead of being taken seriously for their accurate, astute insights;
- ⟐ problems of using their intellect to take advantage of others, which Hollingworth labeled as "benign chicanery," or when gifted children laud their intellect over less-competent others to get their way. Hollingworth conceded that this is a skill mastered by many savvy adults, yet she is cautious when children use it to their advantage, as it may set them apart as loners, which gets back to her initial concern about play and friendships.
In her lifetime, Hollingworth's work never received the recognition it deserved and, being a female, she was seldom taken seriously by foundation directors who could have funded her projects. Still, in retrospect, Hollingworth's work is as groundbreaking as was Terman's. She was just born in an era when her achievements were hijacked by her gender.