This danger of becoming an isolate and a hermit is one that should be carefully studied in the interests of leadership. To combat it we must somehow supply the highly intelligent in their early years with companions, especially of their own age, who can understand what they say, and can answer. This difficulty of communication is illustrated by Voltaire's abortive attempt as an adult to get into contact with the peasants around him. In The Ignorant Philosopher, Voltaire says, "I discovered such a wide difference between thought and nourishment, without which I should not think that I believed that there was a substance in me that reasoned and another substance that digested. Nevertheless, by constantly endeavoring that we are two, I materially felt that I was only one: and this contradiction gave me infinite pain. I have asked some of my own likenesses, who cultivate the earth, our common mother, if they felt that they were two? If they had discovered by their philosophy that they possessed within them an immortal substance . . . acting upon their nerves without touching them, sent expressly into them six weeks after their conception? They thought that I was jesting and pursued the cultivation of their land without making me a reply."
Even so, the ten-year-old, of IQ 175, wishes to discuss with his "own likenesses" the events of medieval history, but he finds that they make him "no reply." And if he persists, they become annoyed, hurling at him the dreadful epithet, "Perfesser." If he still persists, they pull his hair, tear his shirt from his back, and hit him with a beer bottle. (I am speaking of real life.)
Turning now to habits of chicanery, it would be a question for long and close debate, as to whether a highly gifted leader can ever live and do his work among the mass of men without developing a technique of benign chicanery. Many of the great political leaders have been past masters of benign chicanery, often exploiting the people for the good of the social order. Perhaps the arts of benign chicanery are absolutely necessary to a child of highest intelligence, compelled to find his spiritual way through mass education. Certain it is that these children learn all sorts of devious ways to self-preservation. For instance, two of our pupils of Public School 500 came to us followed by notes from teachers, saying they were hard-of-hearing. Both of them have very keen ears, but they had learned not to hear the insupportable drill on things they had known for years, and in self-defense they listened so little that their teachers thought them deaf. At Public School 500 their hearing is good—almost too good!
Guidance in regard to this matter of chicanery is absolutely necessary. Here we have one of the most delicate of all aspects of training of a leader. By teaching these children that they should at all times act with complete candor and straightforwardness, in all sorts of company, shall we be educating them for self-destruction? We could spend hours in discussing this. We cannot do much more here than mention it.
MATTERS OF GENERAL POLICY
I am unwilling to close these remarks without touching upon some matters of general policy, which go beyond selection and training. What of those children, gifted for leadership, who through accidents of fate are without means for the development of their gifts? At our school we are compelled to witness daily the sight of children of fine quality, who do not have enough to eat or wear, to say nothing of having about them beauty or comfort. It is thought by those who have given no precise attention to the matter that "bright children will take care of themselves." This is the routine answer given by foundations established to promote human welfare, when requests are made for grants to study and meet the need of such children. The concern of American philanthropy in the present state of public knowledge is for the chronic dependent, forever incapable of development. This criticism may be justly extended to include not only the leaders of philanthropy today, but political, educational, and other kinds of leaders, who would give all to the burdens of society and nothing to the burden-bearers. To such tendencies of those in power today some halt should be called. 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. Yet this seems to be what elderly society has vaguely in mind, when reiterating that "the bright will take care of themselves."
It is common to refer in this connection to the fact that Mr. John D. Rockefeller had earned and saved a large sum of money by the time he was sixteen years old. However, in this day and age Mr. Rockefeller would have been arrested on the double charge of truancy and violation of the child-labor law, and would have had no savings whatsoever at sixteen years of age. It is shocking to think of Mr. Rockefeller standing at ten years of age before the Juvenile Court, but such would be his situation were he a ten-year-old child today instead of having been such nearly a hundred years ago. In our day a ten-year-old acquires no merit by staying out of school and engaging in the egg business. He acquires, instead, a court summons.
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. By this plan the superior could invest in themselves; very little money would actually be spent, because it would come back again, and the nation would always benefit in ways not now fully foreseeable. The establishment of a revolving fund for the development of tested children would be another "new thing under the sun." It would be a great experiment in social science, now rendered possible for the first time by inventions and discoveries in the field of child psychology.
[1] Teachers College Record, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1938), pages 296-306.