Educating the Gifted Boy
I
WHEN Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence he wrote into it, as what he called a self-evident truth, the statement that all men are created equal. That was in the early summer of 1776. At some time during the following winter, this same Mr. Jefferson advocated in the Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia the adoption of a plan of public education which he had drawn up and which he presented for consideration. This plan of education was based on the assumption that young people vary widely in intellectual gifts, some being born with a far greater aptitude for learning than others. The plan, in short, repudiated the doctrine that all men are created equal. Unfortunately enormous publicity has been given to Mr. Jefferson’s original statement, and very little to his repudiation of it. The persistence of the wholly untenable doctrine of the equality of man has caused no end of mischief in many fields of our national life, and nowhere has the mischief been greater than in the field of education.
The self-evident truth is that, intellectually, all men are not born equal. Passing over the imbeciles and the morons who are born that way, every one of us is aware that among his friends and acquaintances is to be found the most extraordinary variety of mental gifts, and that this variety is the result, not of varying educational advantages, but of innate personal qualities, inherited or originated at birth. Children of the same parents, brothers and sisters who have had identical schooling, show these variations again and again. Everyone recognizes them among his friends. We express the broader contrasts by calling people we know either clever or dull, and we use those words not so much in praise or reproach as to express talent given or withheld by a power over which the individual has no control. The talent is there, or it is not there, through no fault of his. I say we recognize this situation ourselves, as individuals, yet as a community we have resolutely shut our eyes to it, and have built up a system of public and private education which could only be justified if all the pupils were of equal scholastic aptitude.
It is a matter of experience, however, that boys and girls of school and college age show wide differences of intellectual capacity. Those at the top of the scale have brains well worth training, while those at the bottom of the scale have practically no brains at all and can only memorize; thinking is out of their power.
This distinction between thinking and memorizing, or learning, is a very important one, and I shall revert to it later. It is sufficient to point out here that the three R’s, which give us the tools of everyday life, can be acquired with merely the most rudimentary processes of thought, and practically without reasoning at all. The fact that plenty of people can read who cannot understand a word of what they are reading, and that we have machines for both writing and calculating which are far neater and more exact than any human being could ever be, bears out this contention. The work of the first six grades of our public schools is almost wholly of such a character. Successfully to complete it demands not brains but memory and application and drill. To admit to those grades both the brilliant and the dull, and to teach them both together, mingled in the same classes, is not especially unjust to either group, for the brilliant sometimes have poor memories and the dull sometimes have good ones.
As a boy I used to drive a horse which shied violently at a certain spot in the road for months after he had once been frightened there by a piece of newspaper blown at him by a gust of wind. The horse is an animal with a good memory, but no brains. He can be trained, he can learn, but he cannot think. There are plenty of human beings whose mental equipment is not dissimilar. In comparing them with the horse I am more polite than is customary.
II
I have said that the three R’s can be acquired by all children who are not feeble-minded, and that no great harm is done to the gifted children by herding all in the same classes, and probably such an arrangement can continue through the sixth grade of our schools without serious injustice to anyone, but with the seventh grade, and from then on through the high school and through the university, such a mingling of the bright and the dull in the same classrooms, without any other provision forthe training of the bright, is an educational crime of the first magnitude. In no other country in the world, so far as I know, is it ever attempted, and the only reason it is done in America is that the public, which pays the bills, believes that its children are all born equal, and none, therefore, should be given educational advantages which are not open to all.
The result of this demand for higher education for all has been that the junior high school and the high school and the college have all three been forced to adapt their courses of study and their methods of instruction to the horde of pupils who can only memorize and cannot think, and this adaptation has already been almost fatal to the quality of American public secondary and college education. I refer not merely to the multiplication of commercial and domestic science courses, such as journalism, stenography, housekeeping, dietetics, folk dancing, and physical training. Not one teaches the pupils to reason. They can all be mastered by the use of the memory, and their presence in the curricula of schools and colleges is explained by the presence in the student bodies of pupils who have not the power to think. These pupils, being in the schools and the colleges, have to be provided with courses which they can handle, so that they may be able to accumulate the necessary credits to enable them first to enter college and then to obtain their college degrees. In a generation or so we shall all understand what such a degree means, and no harm would be done if that were all.
But, emphatically, that is not all. Just as a large part of the population of our high schools is sent there by parents who completely misapprehend the nature of the learning process and expect that their children will graduate with a guarantee from the state that they are better educated than was Abraham Lincoln, who did not have their advantages, so the children themselves, dimly realizing that the vocational and commercial courses which I have mentioned do not train the mind, enroll in large numbers in the various subjects of study which have always been the medium of sound intellectual discipline. They present themselves as candidates for instruction in the languages, in mathematics, in science, and in the so-called social studies of history, psychology, and government. More than one half of them, at the most conservative estimate, can do no more than memorize facts about these subjects, for it is quite beyond their powers to think or to reason, and their teachers are faced with the problem of reducing the subject matter of every high-school course and of every popular college course to such a form that it can be memorized and reproduced without demanding cerebration on the pupil’s part.
As a result, we find exactly what we should expect to find. The old, stern disciplines of grammar, algebra, geometry, Latin, Greek, history, and what used to be called ‘natural philosophy’ have had to be abandoned. No teacher can face the music of an outraged association of parents if he or she has failed to give passing grades to half of a class in algebra. The only way out for the teacher has been to debase the requirements, and no longer attempt to teach the old testing, power-giving, challenging curriculum which high-school pupils had to face and master a generation or two ago. The names of the old subjects, most of them, remain, but they have been sadly emasculated. The teacher and the textbook now do for the pupil all the thinking that needs to be done in connection with these simplified subjects. Even the study of literature can be passed by any child who can remember what teacher said ought to be thought.
III
Let me repeat that this situation is precisely what was to be expected when the high-school population ceased to be a selected group. If every young person is entitled to be educated at the expense of the state up to twenty or twenty-two years of age, and if all must be educated in the same classes for fear lest a favored few shall obtain a better education than others, then the subject matter must be adapted to the bottom 10 per cent of the pupils. I can see no help for it. Here and there devoted teachers will be found who will give extra time and attention to the brighter pupils, and try to provide them with mental pabulum into which they can get their teeth, but such efforts can be only sporadic, and in the main the minds of the gifted pupils will grow dull, their vision will become blurred, and hundreds of thousands of the potential thinkers of the next generation will acquire the habit of looking to others to do their thinking and form their opinions for them. A democracy needs, above everything else, a sturdy, independent electorate, which does its own thinking, and does it straight, and is not to be bamboozled by specious sophistries. Failing such an electorate, it needs, and needs desperately, the sound leadership of fearless, straightthinking men and women. How can we reintroduce into our system of education, at least for those pupils who can profit by it, the old training in accurate thinking and close reasoning?
I believe such a training for the more gifted pupils can be provided, and without arousing the protests of the excluded, but before elaborating my suggestion I should like to consider for a few moments some fundamental factors of the situation, and also its treatment in other lands. I shall try not to be either too technical or too diffuse.
In the first place, what do I mean by gifted boys and girls, and how is anyone to tell such boys and girls from the others who are not gifted? Boys and girls, when they are washed and brushed and tidied up, look pretty much alike.
Well, I mean, by ‘gifted,’ endowed with superior intellectual capacity. When such an endowment is backed by character and ambition we have a child of great promise, who, with adequate training, may possibly become a leader in the intellectual life of his time. Such a youngster is the sort of material from which scholars, jurists, physicians, theologians, scientists, and statesmen can be made — men who are the thinkers of their generation. I have no means to suggest for the testing of character and ambition except to say that hardships and the necessity of overcoming obstacles are essential factors in the development of both character and ambition, and that an education which presents no obstacles and is shorn of difficulty is as poor an education as I can imagine for the gifted child from the point of view of its effect on his character.
But though there is no test which can be set to five hundred children with the result that they can then be graded accurately on the score of character, tests have been worked out which make it possible to rate such a group quite accurately on the score of their intellectual promise and their intellectual equipment for succeeding in academic competition. It is safe to say that if such a test is given to any class above the fifth grade in any school, and from the scores the top 20 per cent are selected, the most promising 10 per cent of the class, intellectually, will all be included. In other words, in any individual one of these tests a child might, through illness or carelessness, not do his best and slip somewhat seriously in his rating, but not enough to put him down to the twenty-first place if he belongs at the tenth. I am interested in providing a real scholastic training for the top 10 per cent of our children, and I believe that if we provide such a training for the top 15 or 20 per cent, chosen by tests already available, we shall not miss any of those gifted children whom society cannot afford to neglect.
In other countries the public attitude of the community toward education is in astounding contrast to ours. In Germany, Switzerland, and France, no one thinks of higher education as a thing that could be given to everybody, or that ought to be given without cost to anybody. Everyone is given a chance to learn to read and write and cipher, at the public expense, but the schools which correspond to our high schools are open only to a selected group, who have qualified for entrance by passing special examinations. Frequently, those who do brilliantly in these examinations are awarded free scholarships, but in the main an annual tuition fee is required of every pupil, so that the public high schools are supported partly by general taxes and partly by these tuition fees. It is to be noted that the admission examinations serve not only to keep unfit pupils from cluttering up the classrooms and ruining the standards of instruction, but also to ensure that the taxpayers’ money is not wasted in trying to make silk purses out of sows’ ears.
The greatest contrast, however, is found not in the attitude of the public but in the attitude of the teachers. All over western Europe you will find the teachers concentrating their attention on their bright pupils. In America we teach for the bottom 10 per cent; in Europe they teach for the top 10 per cent. A teacher here is concerned for the dull pupil, and moves heaven and earth to ensure his promotion. I think we feel that if we can teach the dull the bright will learn anyway. In Europe the teacher whose pupils win honors in academic competitions is the one who ranks high in his profession.
The same general attitude of mind prevails in England. There, again, the teaching is aimed at the top of each class, and if the dullards cannot grasp what is going on it is of no concern to the teacher, who deals out punishments but does not interrupt an interesting discussion to meet the needs of some lad who will never be a scholar anyway. Hence, the teaching in an English classroom is concerned with thinking and reasoning, with analysis and argument and criticism, rather than with matters which can be memorized and reproduced. Furthermore, no one ‘graduates’ from one of the great English schools. Those boys who have done well — less than half — go on to the universities, and the others take up the work of life, and they take it up without a school diploma. When people compare English and American university freshmen, as they so often do, to our disparagement, they speak truthfully enough, but they seldom explain that the English university man is a picked product, the intellectual flower of a system which ruthlessly cuts off the unpromising buds for the very purpose of developing the finest possible blooms.
IV
In our own country, in recent years, a number of experiments have been tried, all intended to provide a better training for our brighter pupils. Honor sections, ‘projects,’ promotion by subjects, and various other plans have been tried and are being tried. In New York City a special high school has been assigned solely to bright students whose tests and records show them to be unusually promising. I expect that in a few years there will be available some very interesting statistics about the achievements of the graduates of that school, but the plan is obviously only possible in a large city having several high schools. The drawback to some of these experiments is that they are expensive, and our public is jealous of the expenditure of considerable sums on the education of a small group. Before much progress can be made in that direction, the public must be brought to realize that there is actually no expenditure of public money which would be more advantageous to the nation than that which would provide for such an education of our unusually promising children as would secure the highest possible cultivation of their thinking and reasoning powers.
We are confronted, then, with this problem: how to provide the most promising 20 per cent of the pupils in our schools with training in what we may call straight thinking, without excessive outlay, without a greatly increased teaching staff, without setting them apart as an obviously favored group, and without sacrificing any of the real values contained in their present class work. If the problem can be solved, it should ensure the graduation each year, from every high school numbering two thousand pupils, of about one hundred young people who have been really trained to use their own minds. In thirty years the town containing that high school would have three thousand citizens between the ages of twenty and fifty who would have not only the ability to think straight and independently but the habit of doing so. Any community with three thousand such citizens would be fortunate.
Like any other skill, skill in thinking can only be obtained by practice, and the practice must be done under expert supervision, with just enough explanation and analysis of the process to ensure correct form. In planning an education for gifted children, therefore, the basic principle must be to provide for such practice. My plan is simply to provide for the top 20 per cent of every class extra time to be devoted to two essential purposes: first, this practice in thinking which will promote skill in the art; second, making the acquaintance of what the great thinkers of the past have thought and written down.
To anyone familiar with the crowded programme of our secondary schools, the proposal to provide extra time for anything more must sound, at first blush, preposterous, but I think that for gifted pupils it can be done simply and easily, without sacrificing any of the values of the curriculum and without inflicting the slightest hardship on the gifted pupils themselves.
In grades seven to twelve of our schools, a typical programme calls for slightly over twenty periods a week of recitations which require, on the average, something more than twenty periods of outside preparation. The bright child spends not more than half the time on preparing his lessons that the dull one has to spend, yet forty-two periods a week, seven a day, is surely no more than is good for anyone; indeed it ought to be required of any child who has a real ambition to acquire an education. We can assume, then, that our gifted pupil has ten periods of preparation time which he does not now need, and which he might, to his great advantage, devote to the special training I am proposing.
Moreover, the gifted pupil does not need the same amount of time for drilling and testing in his regular curriculum which the other pupils require. I propose that he shall be excused from one recitation period out of four, in each of his major subjects, and that the five periods so gained shall be devoted to our extra course in the art of thinking. Time for the necessary reading and outside preparation for the course is easily available from the ten periods a week which the gifted pupil now has free. In this way, during the last six grades of the school curriculum, five periods a week of class work and nearly ten periods a week of required reading and preparation are available, and a well-rounded, graded, continuous course, involving six consecutive years of study with a recitation period every day in the week, could be worked out.
The pupils to be privileged to take this course would be picked at the end of the sixth-grade year or at the beginning of the seventh, by means of one of the available standardized tests in which vocabulary and reading ability would play a large part, and mathematical talent a smaller one. Those who rated in the top 20 per cent would be selected and given a trial. That would give a section numbering twenty pupils from each room of one hundred, and one teacher could handle four such groups in each grade. The testing of the children is an easy matter, and the grading of such tests is wholly mechanical, so that personal favoritism and partiality would be eliminated. A practical, effective way of selecting the gifted pupils has, in short, already been worked out. It might result in the inclusion of a few who would find the course beyond their powers, and possibly, here and there, a gifted child would be overlooked. Taken all in all, however, it should be possible to set up our course with a very satisfactory selection of pupils.
V
Having established the group, what should we teach them, and how should we teach it? Since thinking has to be done by means of words combined into sentences, and since accurate thinking requires the use of words in their exact meanings and sentences free from any ambiguity, I should say that the foundation of our course should be the study of the meanings of words and the structure of sentences. Since, also, close reasoning must be free from fallacies, I should add to the study of words and sentences the study of the laws of sound and exact reasoning. Next, I should have these children study the nature and method of mathematical reasoning, in regard to numbers, to surfaces, and to measurement or comparison of the various kinds of quantities. Next I should have them consider the purpose, the nature, the laws, and the ethics, of various human activities, such as business, government, and human life.
You will notice that in thus outlining a course of study I have avoided using the name of any one of the recognized subjects of study, yet I might have outlined the course by using the old familiar names, for the study of the meanings of words and the structure of sentences is grammar and rhetoric, the study of reasoning is logic, of mathematical reasoning and measurement is arithmetic, algebra, or geometry, according to the field involved. In our school and college courses, the purpose, nature, laws, and ethics of our various human activities are studied under the names of economics, civics, government, philosophy, and ethics. The reason I have avoided using these wellworn names is that they inevitably would paint a picture of a course of study utterly different from the one I have in mind. I wish, in this practice in learning to think straight, to avoid as poison the aim of amassing facts, and to concentrate on ideas, and purposes, and reasons.
Take, for example, the study of government. In my freshman year in college I took a course called Government I. During the college year we took up, one after another, the forms of government then prevailing in the United States, England, France, Germany, and Switzerland. It was an eminently practical course, and required the memorizing of an enormous number of facts. We had to know, at the end of the year, for instance, the qualifications for membership in the senior and junior branches of the different legislative bodies in all those countries, and the methods of election, as well as the duration in office of the different members. The structure of the various judicial bodies, their powers, and their limitations, even their salaries, were supposed to be learned and remembered, ready for reproduction when called for in an examination. We were held responsible for comparisons between governments in respect to all sorts of details, and especially we had to learn all sorts of things about the varying rights of, and qualifications for, citizenship.
Now that course left out most of the things about government which seem to me interesting and valuable, and insisted on a thousand details no one of which has any real importance at all. If we want to think about government, it seems to me that the first point would be the purposes for which governments exist, the extent to which it is important to sacrifice individual freedom for the public good, and the obligations which a citizen owes his government in return for the benefits received. It is the philosophy and ethics of government, wherever we may find it, that are important and that can be remembered, not the number of congressional districts in the State of Michigan or the number of arrondissements in the department of the Eure.
VI
It would be possible to contrast similarly every one of the recognized school subjects which I have mentioned with the corresponding field of study which I dream of for the gifted boy, but my allotment of space is limited.
I have said enough, I hope, to make it clear that my projected course is to be in complete contrast to all the other school courses of study. They are all good, all valuable, all worth-while, and I am not attacking any of them, but they are all factual subjects. The pupil studies them for the definite purpose of mastering the facts which they present, of language, mathematics, science, or what not, since he is going to need these facts in his later life or his later education. In connection with them, examinations are a natural necessity, for the teacher must make sure that the pupils are accumulating the facts.
From this task of amassing facts I would set free the gifted pupil for five periods a week in order not to amass any more facts but to learn how to think with his mind. If he learns anything it will not be facts but the principles which underlie human life and conduct. All the facts which he may learn in his other courses he will forget unless he uses them frequently, but one does not forget how life works, how human beings behave, or what constitutes a valid argument. Since there is no danger that these selected pupils will forget, therefore, there will be no examinations in my course and no grades.
But there will be a great deal of collateral reading. Straight through the six years the pupils will be learning not only to think but also what the greatest leaders of human thought, down through recorded history, have themselves thought. An average of twenty pages a lesson of selected classics, five periods a week for six years, would make over 20,000 pages. Taken from selected authors from Confucius to Benjamin Franklin, or even to one of the stimulating thinkers of our own time, 20,000 pages of live philosophy would provide a good liberal education in itself.
Such is my suggestion. I believe it eminently practical, and it requires no expensive apparatus, no rows of lathes or batteries of cookstoves. Since the number of pupils involved is small, they can be taken care of by a very few additional teachers. They would lose none of the valuable instruction which they now receive, for experience has shown that a really bright pupil may lose two or three consecutive weeks of school through illness and be back at the head of his class again within ten days after his return. In the place of one period out of every four of his regular recitations, my proposal would give to the gifted and promising pupil an opportunity to exercise and stretch his mind, his reasoning and thinking powers.
What would be the result of training our ablest pupils to think and ingraining in them the habit of independent thinking; what would be the effect on their attitude toward their other studies and especially their college courses; what would happen to their powers of criticism and analysis as the result of some acquaintance with the reservoirs of human thought now almost completely withheld from most of them; and what kind of citizens and neighbors and husbands and fathers a systematic consideration of the ethics of business, government, and human conduct would produce, I cannot tell you. Confucius said, ’Moral virtue simply consists in being able, anywhere and everywhere, to exercise five particular qualities: self-respect, magnanimity, sincerity, earnestness, and benevolence.’ It seems to me that the liberal education which I have tried to describe might very possibly be of considerable power in promoting those five qualities. Let us consider them in order. Self-respect is surely promoted both by learning to face and welcome the truth, whatever it may be, and by working, daily, up to our best powers. Magnanimity is an almost universal characteristic of really deep thinkers. Sincerity would inevitably be developed by practice in honest search for honest argument. Earnestness is best promoted by daily meeting a challenge which demands the exercise of our best powers. And benevolence is the sure result of the understanding of the ethics and philosophy of the common life of mankind. I do not see how the course of study which I have outlined could fail to quicken the moral perceptions of the boys and girls who take it, or fail to improve the quality of their moral fibre.
At the level of university and graduate-school training there is in America no neglect of the gifted student. Provision has been made for his training and for the utilization of his special talents by the establishment of fellowships, the endowment of research institutes and projects, and the creation of a multitude of competitive scholarships in our colleges everywhere. For the discovery and training at the secondary-school level of boys of outstanding promise who may afterwards fill the fellowships and scholarships so provided, almost nothing is being done. We are building the top of an educational pyramid without giving thought to the base on which it must stand. I believe our country owes it to itself to stop paying little or no attention to the special education of its most promising boys and girls. In them lies the hope of the future. Four fifths of us, perhaps a larger proportion, are unable to do serious thinking of any kind. The gifted fifth, who alone have the capacity, must be trained to do our thinking for us. They are not to-day being so trained, but I submit that they might be.