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46. Educational Neglect of Superior Children [TERMAN, L. M., The Intelligence of School Children, pp. 165–166, 190-191. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1919.]

The attention of teachers is constantly being called to the large number of defectives among school children, and to the educational and social problems to which they give rise. For the intellectually superior, however, the ones upon whose preservation and right education the future of civilization most depends, no special provision is made. In the average school system their very existence, even, is ignored. Yet, as we have seen, they are just as numerous as the dull and mentally defective. The latter attract attention by their inability to do the work and by their maladjustment to school discipline. Children of superior ability are often submerged with the masses simply because they are not recognized.

47. The Conservation of Talent

[TERMAN, L. M., "The Conservation of Talent," School and Society, March 29, 1924. Vol. 19, pp. 359-364.]

Cattell has shown that Massachusetts in proportion to population produces 84 times as many men of science as Mississippi. That scientific ability is 84 times as prevalent in the germ plasm of Massachusetts as in the germ plasm of Mississippi seems entirely unreasonable. We prefer to believe that educational opportunity has helped to determine the relative output.

A research now in progress on the mental development of 300 of the most eminent men and women of the last few centuries reveals the fact that many of these geniuses owed their greatest opportunities to happy chance. Newton could never have made his scientific and mathematical discoveries without a university education, and he owed his opportunity to enter Cambridge to the chance visit of an uncle. Liebig, the founder of physiological chemistry, was early withdrawn from school and apprenticed to a pharmacist. There, in a shed behind the apothecary's shop, he began the chemical experiments that later brought his chance to enter a university. One wonders whether those experiments in chemistry would have been undertaken had he been apprenticed to a shoemaker or tailor instead of to a man who dealt in chemicals. .

Another circumstance that has blocked the educational progress of gifted children is the superstition given currency by Lombroso and others, that intellectual precocity is pathologi

cal; that bright children are prone to die young, become insane, or develop post-adolescent stupidity. So thoroughly has this superstition become imbedded in popular thought that even prominent educators are likely to assume that the child of high intelligence quotient must, ipso facto, be anæmic, nervous, conceited, eccentric, non-social, and a stranger to play. . . .

Fortunately, a searching investigation of the entire problem was made possible by two grants from the Commonwealth Fund of New York City, supplemented by appropriations from Stanford University. The purpose of the investigation was to locate 1,000 representative gifted children, to secure for each a large amount of objective data along anthropometric, medical, educational, social and psychological lines, and then to follow the later histories of these children as far as possible into adult life. . . .

A brief statement of some of the results to date may be of interest.

1. Locating the Subjects. . . . Nearly a quarter of a million school children were sifted. First, each teacher was asked to name the brightest child in her room, the second brightest, and, in addition, the youngest. These nominees were then given a National intelligence test, and all who scored high in the National were given a Stanford-Binet. Only those who earned an I. Q. of 140 or higher were included in the study. . . .

2. Sex-Frequency.-The first thing we note here is that the number of boys and girls in the gifted group is nearly equal. There is a slight excess of boys-about 20 per cent-but on the other hand the three highest cases are girls.

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3. Health and Physical Traits.-At all ages these children are taller, heavier, better nourished and physically stronger than unselected children. They were above normal weight at birth, and showed noticeable precocity in walking, talking and dentition. They are freer from organic diseases and have a clearer disease history than the average child. Nervousness, stuttering, chorea, habit spasms, and other neurotic symptoms occur with no more than normal frequency. Their sleep records at the different ages are from 30 to 60 minutes a day above the norms for 3,000 unselected children. They come from families with less than average infant mortality and of more than average longevity.

4. Educational Progress.-The average progress quotient for our entire group is about 114, which means that the typical gifted child is accelerated 14 per cent of his age beyond the normal. In mental age, however, he is 48 per cent beyond the normal. The difference between 48 per cent and 14 per cent is 34 per cent; so the typical gifted child is under-promoted to the extent of one third

of his age. Whether this retardation is warranted is a hotly debated question. . . . Another fact brought out by the achievement tests is that the mental development of the gifted child is not often markedly one-sided. Generally speaking, however, the gifted child does his best work in the difficult subjects where success depends most upon the higher thought processes.

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5. Social Development.-The wide-spread belief that gifted children are likely to be socially queer, sissified and ignorant of play was considered important enough to justify extensive investigation by the test method. . . . Scores of our gifted group showed a large excess of play information, noticeable excess maturity of play interests, and normal masculinity indices. That gifted boys tend to be more effeminate in their play interests than unselected boys of the same age appears to have no foundation in fact. . . . There are gifted children who are eccentric, socially defective and unpopular; but the proportion of such cases is apparently even less than among children in general.

6. Character Traits.-As compared with unselected children, they are more conscientious, less boastful and less absorbed in questionable interests. Ratings by teachers and parents on these and other moral traits confirm the test scores. The conclusion is that here as elsewhere gifted children are superior to the common run.

7. Heredity.-Children of so many superiorities could hardly have acquired them all through environmental influences. Nor have they, for their heredity, too, is demonstrably superior. More than 50 per cent of our group have sprung from the top 4 per cent or 5 per cent of the vocational hierarchy. The professional and semi-professional classes together account for more than 80 per cent. The unskilled labor classes furnish but a paltry 1 per cent or 2 per cent. One fourth of our children have at least one parent who is a college graduate. The average schooling for parents is about 12 grades completed as compared with 6 for the general population.

The list of eminent relatives reads like a roster of American genius. For example, 23 per cent. of the members of the Hall of Fame are known to have relatives in our gifted group, and the number of high officials, generals, statesmen, writers and other notables is astonishing. One boy of 180 I. Q. has 34 known relatives listed either in Who's Who or Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography.

In this connection two facts of serious portent should be mentioned. (1) The racial stocks most prolific of gifted children are those from northern and western Europe, and the Jewish. The least prolific are the Mediterranean races, the Mexicans and the Negroes. (2) The fecundity of the family stocks from which our gifted children come appears to be definitely on the wane. It has been figured that if the present differential birth rate continues,

1,000 Harvard graduates will at the end of 200 years have but 50 descendants, while in the same period 1,000 South Italians will have multiplied to 100,000. . . . I have emphasized the desirability of more rapid advancement of the bright child. This is important. But grade skipping is far from an ideal or complete solution of the problem. The real need is for a differentiation of curriculum and of methods such as will give to every child the type of educational diet from which he can derive the maximum nourishment.

48. Superior Pupils

[HOLMES, H. W., "Intelligence Tests and Individual Progress in School Work," Twenty-First Yearbook, National Society for the Study of Education, Part II, p. 121. Bloomington, Public School Publishing Co., 1922.]

To deal, however, with all children of proved mental superiority as if rapid promotion were the only way to deal with them is to confess poverty of resources and ingenuity. . . . To select certain children for rapid advancement and to push them ahead of their fellows is not necessarily good for them, for the group they leave, or for the group they join.

49. Is Segregation of Superior Pupils Democratic? [TRABUE, M. R., "The Use of Intelligence Tests in Junior High Schools," Chap. vi, p. 171, Twenty-First Yearbook, The National Society for the Study of Education, Part II. Bloomington, Public School Publishing Co., 1922.]

Considering the matter abstractly, a thoroughly democratic state should provide each child an equal opportunity to develop his individual capacities to their maximal effectiveness. To ignore the fact that children differ in their native endowments and in their social and vocational futures, and to force all pupils to take exactly the same educational course is not only extremely undemocratic, but is also practically impossible. However narrow and uniform the offerings of a school may be, its pupils do not obtain the same amounts of training from the same amounts of attendance. If individual differences in children were the only factors to be considered in the formulation of an educational program, individual instruction would be the universal practice, not only in regard to the rates of progress, but also in regard to the fields in which progress would be attempted. From an economic and social point of view, however, it would be extremely wasteful of the energy of teachers and of the pub

lic resources to train each child separately. A public school must serve the state economically as well as serve the future citizens of the state individually. Certain differences in children's endowments and future histories are so small as to be relatively unimportant as far as their training in a given field is concerned. Furthermore, there are certain habits of thought, action, and feeling which must be more or less universal if the state is to maintain itself as a unit. For these and other reasons, pupils in the public schools are grouped in classes, rather than taught as though each individual were a distinct class in himself.

50. Educational Determinism; or Democracy and the I. Q. [BAGLEY, W. C., "Educational Determinism; or Democracy and the I. Q." School and Society, April 8, 1922, Vol. 15, pp. 373-384.] (Abridged.)

"Democracy and the I. Q." is the title of a paper read in 1922 before the Society of College Teachers of Education at Chicago. It precipitated the most significant controversy that has taken place in the educational world for a generation or more. This paper and several others have been published in a volume entitled, Determinism in Education, published by Warwick and York, Baltimore, 1925.

In the words of one educator, "Professor Bagley more than any one else has stimulated attempts to formulate the fundamental basis of test-interpretation."

As used in this discussion, educational determinism means the attitude of mind consequent upon the conviction or the assumption that the influence of education is very narrowly circumscribed by traits or capacities which, for each individual, are both innate and in themselves practically unmodified by experience or training. . . .

Mr. Colvin, in his very sensible discussion of intelligence tests in the current Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, makes this statement: "The brightest European child reared from birth by a group of African pigmies would appear as a moron or worse if later transported to a highly civilized and cultured environment." According to the determinist, however, the teacher who works some of the most important of these miracles of transformation is only a sort of rubber stamp to certify that his pupils have a certain amount of native intelligence. . . .

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