Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies - Softcover

Hulbert, Ann

 
9781101971321: Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101971320 ISBN 13: 9781101971321
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Ann Hulbert’s in-depth exploration of the lives of sixteen extraordinary children over the course of the past century casts new light on America’s current obsession with early achievement. The figures she profiles include math genius Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics; two girls whose fiction and poetry stirred debate in the 1920s; the movie superstar Shirley Temple; the African-American pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler; the chess champion Bobby Fischer; computer pioneers and “prodigious savants” with autism; and musical prodigies, present and past. Hulbert probes the changing roles of parents and teachers as well as of psychologists and a curious press. Above all, she delves into the feelings of the prodigies themselves, whose stories so intriguingly raise hopes about untapped human potential and questions about how best to nurture it.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ANN HULBERT is the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children and The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford. Her articles and reviews have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic, where she is the literary editor. She is a graduate of Harvard and spent a year at Cambridge University. She lives with her husband in Washington, D.C.

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CHAPTER 1

The Wonder Boys of Harvard

• 1 •

“The first thing my April Fool’s boy wanted from the great outside world was the moon,” wrote a young mother named Sarah Sidis, recalling her firstborn’s arrival in the family on the cusp of the twentieth century.

We stood at the window of the apartment together in the evening, with Billy in Boris’ arms, and admired the moon over Central Park. Billy chuckled and reached for it. The next night when he found that the moon was not in the same place, he seemed disturbed. Trips to the window became a nightly ritual, and he was always pleased when he could see the “moo-n.”

This led to Billy’s mastering higher mathematics and planetary revolutions by the time he was eleven, and if that seems to be a ridiculous statement I can only say, “Well, it did.”

The moon-gazing scene is a classic parental experience, a memory likely to stick, even if it goes unrecorded in a baby book. A brilliant sphere or sliver hangs in the sky. The baby arm reaches out, pointing, and the round eyes are even brighter than usual as they look first at the moon, then into your eyes, then back at the light out there in the darkness. “Moon,” you say, a word almost as mesmerizing, in English, as the sight. The tiny lips purse, and out comes a sound that no cow could imitate. “Yes, moon,” you say again, and the future seems full of promise for a young soul excited by a new word and fascinated by the view. This baby, who doesn’t want to turn away, will surely go far in life—and in the cool moonglow, you feel thrilled and perhaps also a little terrified at what may be in store for both of you.

Sarah Sidis told her unusual version of the story years after the birth on April 1, 1898, of one of the first, and for a time most famous, child prodigies of the modern era. Billy’s full name was William James Sidis, after the renowned Harvard psychologist who was her husband’s mentor and the boy’s godfather. At eleven, enrolled at Harvard, Billy made headlines when he delivered a lecture on the fourth dimension to the university’s Mathematical Club, “with the aid of a crayon which he wielded with his little hand,” wrote The New York Times.

By then Sarah and her husband, Boris, had made it their mission to jolt turn-of-the-century Americans with a thrilling, and terrifying, message: learning, if it was begun soon enough, could yield phenomenal results very early and rapidly. Russian Jews, they had fled the pogroms in Ukraine for the garment sweatshops on the United States’s East Coast in the mid-1880s. Within ten years they had worked their way to the top of American higher education. Sarah, by 1898 a rare woman with an M.D. (from Boston University School of Medicine), considered her husband “the most brilliant man in the world.” After tutoring Sarah, Boris had racked up a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard within four years. But inborn talent had nothing to do with their feats, or their son’s, they insisted: Billy was not miraculous, and Boris’s brilliance was more honed than inherited. (Reared in a polyglot world by a bookish merchant, he had been multilingual and a voracious young reader, who boldly began educating peasants as a teenager—for which he was imprisoned by the tsar.) The long-standing fear that precocity was the prelude to early degeneracy was groundless. An as-yet-unimagined potential lay in every child, and it was time parents started cultivating it, Boris urged. The country, more than ever, needed “the individuality, the originality, the latent powers of talent and genius” too often wasted.

Their zeal will sound familiar, echoed by current apostles of the “10,000 hour rule” of “deliberate practice,” begun the younger the better. The impatience with low expectations remains a refrain. So does the warning that if we heedlessly neglect childhood opportunities to excel, we’re jeopardizing a valuable national resource. The opposite concern, conveyed by William James in a letter, is alive and well, too. “I congratulate you on W.J.S.—what you tell of him is wonderful,” he wrote of his four-year-old godson in 1902. But he was clearly alarmed. “Exercise his motor activities exclusively for many years now! His intellect will take care of itself,” he told Boris. Did James realize that the rest of his letter—he cited a Harvard colleague’s prodigious son as a cautionary example—risked egging the Sidises on? That problem is familiar as well. James noted that the university’s first professor of Slavic languages, Leo Wiener—another remarkable émigré from tsarist Russia (he had taken the Bialystok high school entrance exams at ten and knew that many languages by his teens)—was several steps further along with his phenomenal son, Norbert. “Now at the age of seven,” James reported, the boy “has done all the common school work, and of course can’t get into the high school, so that his father is perplexed what to do with him, since they make difficulties about admitting him to the manual training schools in Cambridge.”

Seven years later, when both boys converged on Harvard—there was no stopping the mission—their fathers, with Boris in the lead, had the eye and ear of the public as they sounded a democratic call to Americans to get busy enriching their children’s fast-growing minds. An influx of underage standouts at the nation’s most prestigious university put them all in the spotlight. In the fall of 1909, Norbert, almost fifteen, arrived as a graduate student in zoology after getting his B.A. in math at Tufts in three years. Billy, now known as William, was admitted at eleven as a “special student.” They were joined by two children of the Reverend Adolf Berle, an ambitious Congregationalist minister in Boston—Adolf Jr., fourteen, and his sister, Lina, fifteen, at Radcliffe—and a scion of a blue-blooded Boston family, Cedric Houghton, also fifteen. (The following fall, a fourteen-year-old musician named Roger Sessions enrolled.)

The two superprecocious sons of the immigrant professor and doctor, outspoken men with bushy mustaches and accents, inspired the most interest—and the most suspense. The world was in ferment, and Harvard along with it. The basic contours of the flux haven’t changed. A new century of global migration and international tensions was under way. The pace of scientific progress had picked up. The fledgling field of psychology was taking off—Freud visited the United States in 1909—and Einstein’s revolutionary papers of 1905 had stirred baffled interest. The arrival of these brilliant boys, with their unusual pedigrees, fit the mission of Harvard’s outgoing president, Charles W. Eliot, a liberal Boston Brahmin and staunch believer in equality of opportunity. He aimed to open university doors to “men with much money, little money, or no money, provided that they all have brains.” And not just brains, Eliot warned complacent WASPs, who mistook “an indifferent good-for-nothing, luxurious person, idling through the precious years of college life” for an ideal gentleman or scholar. Eliot had in mind an elite with “the capacity to prove by hard work that they have also the necessary perseverance and endurance.”

Boris and Leo, more radically egalitarian than Eliot, promised that anyone’s children could soar like their sons—and do so without undue strain, if parents were prompt enough and pursued the right methods. The prospect stirred great interest, but also wariness, on campus and...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101971320
ISBN 13 
9781101971321
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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