Leta Stetter Hollingworth

“ A lesson which many gifted persons never learn as long as they live is that human beings in general are inherently very different from themselves in thought, in action, in general intention, and in interests. Many a reformer has died at the hands of a mob which he was trying to improve in the belief that other human beings can and should enjoy what he enjoys. This is one of the most painful and difficult lessons that each gifted child must learn, if personal development is to proceed successfully. It is more necessary that this be learned than that any school subject be mastered. ”

“ He wished for a more valid method of gauging ability, and he fully realized that it would be of greater advantage to study "the living individual." "Is reputation a fair test of natural ability?" he asked. "It is the only one I can employ . . . am I justified in using it? How much of a man's success is due to his opportunities, and how much to his natural power of intellect?"
Galton's work was finished before Binet's studies made it possible to measure natural ability apart from reputation; and what is most essential of all, to measure natural ability in childhood. ”

“ There is with intelligent children a stronger tendency to argue about what is required of them than is found with the average child. This tendency to argue as to the why and wherefore of a requirement is met both at home and at school, and calls for thought in proper handling on the part of parents and teachers. To find a golden mean between arbitrary abolition of all argument, on the one hand, and weak fostering of an intolerable habit of endless argumentation, on the other, is not always easy, but it is always worth while as a measure for retaining the respect of the child. ”

“ Only a few in the top one per cent can contribute to actual progress. As Franklin K. Lane has said, "Progress means the discovery of the capable. They are our natural masters. They lead because they have the right. And everything done to keep them from rising is a blow to what we call our civilization." To develop each according to his ability: this is democracy at its ideal best.
The education of the best thinkers should be an education for initiative and originality. ”

“ But shall we guide all our highly intelligent pupils into college preparatory courses? Or shall some of them be positively guided so that they will end high school without the "credits" for college? Shall all whose circumstances tend to force them into vocational high schools be allowed to drift in that direction? Here is a question of fundamental importance for society, which at this moment we hardly know enough to raise, much less answer. Only one in every hundred tests at or above 130 IQ (S-B) . What does society most need from this little handful of persons? ”

“ Though he himself is but a boy, he wages a war unsuited to his boyish years. Oh, ye of little faith, vex not your souls about the age of the gods! Genius divine outpaces time, and brooks not the tedium of tardy growth. Hercules was still no more than a child when he crushed the serpent in his baby hands. ”

“ Is it possible that a child who varies as far above his contemporaries as an imbecile or an idiot varies below them, will find only advantages and no special difficulties of development created for him by the fact of his wide deviation from the norm?
Observation and measurement of gifted children as they have grown from early childhood to maturity have made it possible to formulate definitely some of the special problems of development which arise from being an extreme and infrequently occurring deviate. ”

“ For a people to deny its natural aristocracy is a social error in the broader sense.
Now the truth is that children of great ability are virtually as helpless as any others under authorities blind to their exceptionality. It would be an impossibly strong and shrewd child who could today conduct his own education under the compulsory school laws; make money to live on and accumulate funds for his own higher education under the child-labor laws—all in the first eighteen years of his life. ”

“ This element in our juvenile population, so significant and so rarely found, passes unrecognized at present through the public schools. We have not even commenced to evolve an education suitable for a child who at 9 or 10 years of age is able to think on a college level. The idea that such children exist at all is even laughed at to scorn by teachers and principals who have a quarter of a century of "experience" behind them. These children have no way of making themselves known. The mental tests make them known. They become known only to those educators who "believe in" mental tests. ”

“ There is no more serious question than this in all education. How shall a democracy educate the most educable? At present these children are to a great extent lost in the vast enterprises of mass education, and are left to handle their special problems as they may, by themselves, while the energies of teachers are bent upon the main business of dealing with the ninety-nine per cent who test below 130 IQ (S-B) . Common sense would tell us that a child who tests as far above the average as a feeble-minded child tests below cannot escape having special problems under conditions of mass education. ”

“ What is needed for the support and development of those children whom we see before us daily, and who represent scores of others in the same economic condition, is what we may call a revolving foundation. By this is meant a fund from which the gifted young could draw at any age the means for their development, with the moral (not legal) obligation to repay according to ability to do so, after twenty years, without interest. ”

“ A choice must be made among the numerous possibilities, since modern life calls for specialization.
The dangers in development with respect to work habits are, therefore, that the child may not develop any habits of sustained effort, and that he may fail of success as a worker through being interested in too many things ever to accomplish very much at any one of them. His problem as he goes into adolescence is to make a definite choice, and to form the habit of effort. ”

“ When asked why she did not play with dolls, she replied, "They aren't real. The doll that is supposed to be a baby doll is twice as big as the one that is made like a mother doll."
Aside from their dissatisfaction with the play habits ordinarily associated with their sex, gifted girls have various other problems to face which arise directly from the facts that they are able and that they are girls. When they reach the stage of life-planning, as they do very early, they are confused in their self-seeking by the uncertainty in contemporary customs as to what a girl may become. ”

“ In social gatherings, size and physical maturity are important as absolute quantities and qualities, and not in relation to age. Thus a child should not be placed too far out of his age-group. A very gifted boy, reaching at twenty years a stature of five feet nine inches, remarked, "It is very odd to be as large as the people you're with!" Being always the smallest member of a social group may develop attitudes which are hard to revise when eventually the boy or girl achieves adult stature and is "as large as the people you're with." ”

“ This concept of an optimum which is not a maximum difference between the leader and the led has very important implications for selection and training. We cannot do more than to point to it here, in passing. Among school children—as among the peoples of all times—the great intellectual leaders are unrecognized, isolated, and even ridiculed by all but a few in the ordinary course of mass education. They can develop leadership of their sort only when placed in special classes. ”

“ The pupils in the classes for rapid learners will go to senior high school when they are thirteen years old. In the meantime, they will be learning and thinking in the company of their contemporaries as regards age and social interests. They will have proper intellectual training, and will at no time idle their time away, be practiced in habits of laziness, or become the victims of boredom. They will emerge into high school with a background of knowledge richer and fuller by far than that of pupils of equal mentality, for whom no enrichment program has been provided. ”

“ If experimental observation should prove this hypothesis to be true, how should the secondary school set about it to provide for the genuine education of such pupils? Should the huge high schools of a great city, like New York, organize an enrichment curriculum within the honor schools for these extreme deviates? Should honor schools have faculties proper to them only? Assuming an enrichment program for pupils above 150 IQ (S-B) to be found desirable or necessary in secondary school, what matters shall find place in such a curriculum? ”

“ Much could be said of the special problems of the young gifted child in this period of immaturity when his intellectual needs are those of an adolescent while his emotional control and physical powers are still but those of a child. It would be of great interest to study the reactions of older persons to the insistent questions and searchings of these young children. "You are too young to understand." "You can't know all that till you grow older." ”

“ The idea has been expressed by thinkers other than professed psychologists—and at times by psychologists themselves—that men of genius are a separate species, partaking of qualities not shared in any degree by persons at large. This concept is at one with that which would regard the idiot and the imbecile as distinct in kind, not in degree only, from the mass of mankind. Genius would thus be not merely more of the same but a different sort altogether. ”

“ In the first place, we have proved that children who rate in the top one per cent of the juvenile population in respect to "judgment," as Binet called it, also possess much more often than others those additional qualities which thinkers have most frequently named as desirable in leaders. There is a strong probability that a child who rates as only one in a hundred for intelligence will also be endowed in superior degree with "integrity, independence, originality, creative imagination, vitality, forcefulness, warmth, poise, and stability." ”

“ The concept of democracy on which the United States was founded is one of equality of opportunity. The intention of our educational policy is that every child should have a chance to develop as his natural abilities may entitle him to do, all artificial distinctions being eliminated. Now at last psychological science has provided an effective instrument for achieving this democracy in education, namely the mental test, by means of which a child may be recognized for his own ability, regardless of age, sex, race, creed, or economic condition. ”

“ Ordinary records and histories are perhaps not well suited to disclose originality in childhood unless it is obtrusive. The child who devises a new way of tying his shoes, of arranging his books, of managing his pets, of sharpening his skates, may very easily get no clinical credit for these inventions. No one, indeed, except the child himself may ever know of them, and it may never occur to him that they are "creative." ”

“ It has always been possible to appraise the ability of people forty or fifty years old, after they have met "the tests of life," but for the pursuit of education and social science it is not very practically useful to know what a person is like only at the end of his life. It is essential, rather, to know with a high degree of precision and certainty the mental endowment of persons at the beginning of their lives if anything is to be done in the matter of special training for special children. ”

“ In the delicate face clever, expressive eyes are captivating, which, with pondering, take on at first a curiously serious, concentrated expression. In the whole, he does not at all make an impression of an unhealthy, jaded child, but rather of a boy with a completely fresh and merry view of the world. ”

“ At home, a special problem of discipline may arise occasionally due to the circumstance of that child, while still very immature in years, has come to exceed one parent or both in intelligence. For the best discipline routine the parent must be more intelligent than the child or the child's respect for the opinions of the former will inevitably be lost. With the most gifted children this may quite early become a problem, since such children, by the age of ten years or before, are more intelligent than the average adult is. ”

“ Solitude is but a refuge of genius, not its goal. Time after time one detects, from the lives or writings of genius, that solitude is not its destiny but only a retreat; not the normal fruition of its being, but an empty harbor sheltering it from the tortures, griefs, and calumnies of the world. ”

“ The thought has been advanced that intellectual genius is a matter of specialization; that the mind of a genius will not, typically, work on all data with superior results, but that it is adapted only or primarily to certain kinds of intellectual performance. In other words, the genius is thought to lack general ability. ”

“ But although they love play, and have much play knowledge, the play of the highly intelligent works out in practice as a somewhat difficult compromise among their various powers. They follow their intellectual interests as far as they can, but these are checked in many ways by age, by degree of physical immaturity, and by tradition. An eight-year-old of 160 IQ may, for example, be deeply interested in tennis, but he is likely to be more or less kept from playing because his physical development is not yet equal to the demands of the game. ”

“ This polar tension acts as an effective and dynamic factor and produces in the genius the labile equlibrium, the effective super-pressure, that continuous, restless impulsiveness, which carries him far beyond placid, traditional practice and the simple satisfaction of life. On the other hand, in regard to his intellectual abilities, the polar tension creates in the genius his wide mental horizon, the diverse and complicated wealth of his talent, the all-embracing personality. ”