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THE SMART NEWS SOURCE | Feb 10 2010 03:25 | LAST UPDATED Feb 10 2010 03:25 |
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In general you are more likely to pursue a similar profession to one of your parents and if you are a prodigy, the field is almost always one in which your parents were accomplished, or wished that they had been. Such children are hothoused through regimes of accelerated learning. A typical example is John Adams, who passed Britain’s O-levels (exams taken in year 11 of schooling, normally at the age of 16) when he was eight and A-levels (year 13 exams, usually taken at the age of 18) a year later. His father, Ken, published a book (sanguinely entitled -- as 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 prepubescent 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, such as being able to calculate (there are children who for no apparent external, nurtured reason are able to multiply and divide improbably difficult numbers without blinking). There are almost no authenticated cases of prodigies who have come 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.  CONTINUES BELOW Nearly all prodigious modern sportsmen and women, such as the tennis players Venus and Serena Williams, have been obsessively coached from a young age, usually with their parents watching from the sidelines. 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. It is also not 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 and 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 while working as a child psychologist, 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. Thinking, “he obviously doesn’t want the true answer, so what’s he got in mind?” they would say, “I’d tell the teacher.” The less people-pleasing ones would get no marks for not worrying what I wanted to hear, but it is often from their ranks that truly original creators come. In the field of entrepreneurial business high-achievers, for example, a high proportion do not even obtain year 11 exam grades. People-pleasing and breaking moulds do not go together. When it comes to achievement, motivation is hugely important. Although politicians bang on about “ability” and “talent” as if it is “Godgiven” (as former British prime minister Tony Blair once put it), these come out of relationships with parents and a consequent desire to succeed, much more so than genes. -- © Guardian News & Media 2009 TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
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Twannie Herinck on December 3, 2009, 10:39 am
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He was surely a child prodigy, ‘came from a family of gifted musicians; but he was also one of the greatest musical geniuses of the last millennium.
Clever parents have –on average- clever offspring. If the parents/family excel at a certain skill, then that skill can be transferred by both genetic and environmental factors. Even if the hereditary factor is not certain, it certainly improves the odds at excelling in a given discipline.
Whilst there is no sharp delineation, we should distinguish between academic, or “cerebrally derived” abilities on the one hand, and performances in other fields on the other-. (Musicality is more related to academic ability). The former is more heavily dependant on measurable (genetically decided) intelligence; the latter is more determined by the way the individual is stimulated and motivated in childhood.
In general, rarely excellence -at the genius level- can be attributed to inborn factors alone.
If driving certain children very hard is the price that humanity pays for producing very highly performing individuals –so be it.