Freeman points out that it’s easy to put out this fire by cramming kids with a school-like education. It’s also easy to ruin the lives of even the most gifted people by treating them like brains on a stick. “After many years, I have become convinced that making only one aspect of a child’s life – his or her talent – the basis for making decisions that will affect the rest of his or her life jeopardizes that child’s emotional balance and, ultimately, his or her success in life,” she writes.
The bottom line is that we need to give intelligence its place. We need to respect intelligence and place precocious children in an environment that nurtures and develops them. But we don’t want to overvalue intelligence. In my view, it’s crazy that so many top universities require students to score 1300 or 1400 or higher on the SAT and reject most applicants below that. This places too much value on a narrow aspect of ability.
When we look at people who have achieved truly great things, we find that most of them weren’t geniuses. They didn’t wow people at 18, but they developed a deep interest and mastery in something as an adult. Many of society’s greatest contributors didn’t have some easily identifiable, extraordinary ability; it was a winning combination of subtle advantages and personality traits that made them successful.
A recurring concept in Freeman’s book is “what if I’d stopped at…” If she’d stopped interviewing at 20, we would never have known how a brilliant childhood led to a sad adulthood. If she’d stopped at 40, we would never have known how someone who was once lost found his way. Life is surprisingly non-linear. John Radford, in his book Prodigies and Exceptional Early Achievers, argued that it is nearly impossible to predict adult proficiency from childhood talent.
Yes, if you’re born super smart, you’re lucky and likely to do well, but as Rubinski and Benkow said in our conversation, we want to see each person as a whole. In other words, while it’s good to know people who do well on IQ tests, it’s even more important to know people who burn with inner passion.
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