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    The Prodigy Puzzle - by Ann Hulbert

'So you're the geniuses," Senator Carl Levin said, looking pleased as he peered over his glasses. He was addressing the flaxen-haired Heidi Kaloustian, a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Michigan, and John Zhou, a superfriendly 17-year-old senior at Detroit Country Day School, unusual visitors to Room 269 of the Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill. Michigan had distinguished itself, Levin had been informed: the state boasted two Davidson Fellows, and he had clearly been told these teenagers came trailing brainy superlatives. "Genius loves company," announced the September press release about the students who had won scholarships awarded annually since 2001 by the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a foundation that supports "profoundly intelligent" youths, a more recent term for off-the-charts children. "Seventeen prodigies," the press release went on, were "to be honored at the Library of Congress for contributions to society" in the fields of science, math, technology, music and literature.

Even among these superstars, the young Michiganders stood out. All the accolades and attention added up to a thrilling but evidently also somewhat disorienting experience, at least for one of them. "I'm generally pretty shy, hesitant to show my work," Heidi told me over the summer - a reticence that had only partly been drummed out of her by joining her high school's poetry-slam team at a teacher's insistence. Sitting on the couch awaiting the senator, she looked slightly dazed at being in the limelight: Heidi was one of the four Davidson "fellow laureates" this year - recipients of the top $50,000 scholarship awards for projects they had submitted. She was also the first laureate ever in literature, with a writing portfolio she titled "The Roots of All Things." John, a scientist whose 2005 accomplishments also included semifinalist standing in the national math, physics and biology olympiads, was taking his $25,000 award in stride. He was one of five winners at that level. The remaining eight Fellows received $10,000 each - money to be disbursed for approved educational purposes for up to 10 years.

Apparently feeling his visitors deserved more than the usual small talk, Senator Levin forged on with "Where are your souls?"

"You mean what are our projects?" John responded, ready with the title of his: "A Study of Possible Interactions Among Rev1, Rev3 and Rev7 Proteins From Saccharomyces Cerevisiae." John laughed along with everyone else when Levin remarked, "I understood the word 'protein,' " and with the confident charm of a youth who has spent lots of time with adults, he told the senator he really enjoyed seeing him at a recent AIDS walk in Michigan (for which John had organized a school team). Turning to Heidi, who explained that she wrote both poetry and prose, Levin was prompted to joke, "So writers are worth twice as much as scientists these days?" It was a short step to reminiscences about college-tuition bills for his own daughters. The Senate photographer then sprang into action, arranging a classic portrait of future promise: professorial senator in the middle, flanked on one side by a bright-eyed youth and on the other by a mother wearing a grin her child might later tell her looks goofy.

For the Davidson Fellows who came to Washington in late September for a gathering that culminated in an evening reception at the Library of Congress, the visit to Capitol Hill was more than a photo op. It was an effort to help promote the vision of their patrons, the founders of the Reno-based Davidson Institute, Bob and Jan Davidson. Drawing on a fortune earned in the educational-software business, the Davidsons established themselves as a well-endowed new presence on the gifted-education scene in 1999. Their goal is not just to support extraordinary youthful achievements, though their contributions to the cause of enriching precocious childhoods have been wide-ranging. The institute's enterprises include, in addition to the fellowships, a free consulting service now assisting 750 "Young Scholars" between the ages of 4 and 18 who qualify with top test scores (99.9th percentile, I.Q.'s of at least 145) or, for those without a battery of assessments, portfolio submissions. The Davidsons have also begun the Think Summer Institute, offering college courses for 12- to 15-year-olds. Next fall the Davidson Academy, a public middle and high school for the profoundly gifted, will open on the Reno campus of the University of Nevada. How much pleasure the Davidsons, in their early 60's, take in celebrating the accomplishments of the fellows was obvious at the reception: Bob, strong-jawed and a jokester, and the elfin Jan glowed like godparents as they beckoned the multicultural array of prize-winners up to the dais to speak about their projects - "prodigious work," a term the Institute favors, ranging from the adorable 6-year-old Marc Yu's piano performance to the 17-year-old Kadir Annamalai's work on the "growth of germanium nanowires," useful in thermoelectric devices.

It is the Davidsons' other, related aim that calls forth a different kind of fervor. Authors (with Laura Vanderkam) of a book called "Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Minds" (2004), they are on a mission to remedy what they are convinced is a widespread neglect of exceptionally talented children. That means challenging the American myth that they are weirdos or Wunderkinder best left to their own devices or made to march with the crowd. "By denying our most intelligent students an education appropriate to their abilities," Jan Davidson warns a nation in the midst of a No Child Left Behind crusade, "we may also be denying civilization a giant leap forward." Precocious children are not only avid learners eager for more than ordinary schools often provide, the Davidsons emphasize; they are also a precious - and imperiled - resource for the future. The Davidsons, joined by many other advocates of the gifted, maintain that it is these precocious children who, if handled right, will be the creative adults propelling the nation ahead in an ever more competitive world. As things stand, the argument goes, the highly gifted child is an endangered species in need of outspoken champions like the Davidsons, who are role models for the "supportive, advocating parent" they endorse.

The youths have their chance to engage in advocacy, too, and the Davidsons had selected very personable prodigies to visit Washington to publicize the don't-hold-children-back message. (Video presentations are part of the fellowship application process.) "Rounded like an egg" is the simile John Zhou used in the SAT-prep classes he taught (though he himself, a perfect scorer, didn't take any), where he recommends blending a well-honed talent with other interests to "erase the image of the nerd or the geek" - a balanced profile the Davidsons would surely endorse. Their fellows fitted it and proved ideal ambassadors of well-tended youthful brilliance. Admirably poised, they were getting precocious practice for the future eminence that, they were told more than once that day, awaits them.

The Davidsons are not the first Americans dedicated to cultivating early promise and dismantling the popular image of highly gifted children as misfits, an affront to a nation founded on egalitarian principles. More than three-quarters of a century ago, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, armed with his newly minted I.Q. test, set out to challenge the myth that unusually intelligent and talented children are "puny, overspecialized in their abilities and interests, emotionally unstable, socially unadaptable, psychotic and morally undependable." His longitudinal "Genetic Studies of Genius" aimed to prove the opposite: highly gifted youths tended not only to enjoy more wholesome childhoods than ordinary kids but also to become extraordinary adults. His labors have since helped spawn a rich field of research and outreach devoted to exceptionally gifted children - though you might not guess it from the embattled rhetoric employed by gifted-child advocates in general, not just the Davidson Institute.

The lament uttered half a century ago that in philistine America "there are no little leagues of the mind" could not be made in our turn-of-the-millennium meritocracy. Thanks precisely to programs like those run by the Davidson Institute, there is what you might call a farm system devoted to finding talent and developing it, and though the process isn't streamlined, it has become ever more extensive. You merely have to look at the résumés of the Davidson Fellows, which list a stunning array of distinctions - from music and Intel competitions to math and science olympiads to participation in highly selective summer programs. Even as they sound the alarm, prominent advocates themselves celebrate the widening span of resources. Consider, for example, "A Nation Deceived," the Templeton National Report on Acceleration issued last year and subtitled, "How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students." In its brief for more grade skipping and subject acceleration, it indicts an educational system that indeed gives talented students short shrift. (Federal money for the "gifted and talented" is minuscule compared with the quarter billion in this year's No Child Left Behind budget, and state and local efforts, though often better, are uneven.) Yet in the course of promoting the benefits of leaping ahead, "A Nation Deceived" also extols "a whole host of outside-of-school opportunities, including award ceremonies, summer programs, after-school or Saturday programs, distance-learning programs and weekend workshops and seminars," to which the talent search serves as a "gateway" for the topmost students, who also have a variety of early college options to consider, like California State University at Los Angeles's lively early-entrance program. Julian Stanley, a Johns Hopkins psychology professor and a pioneer of the gifted-child movement, marveled not long before he died last summer at age 87 at how a dearth of opportunities had given way to a "wealth of facilitative options."

Perhaps the time has come to examine a rather different myth, embraced by gifted-child advocates themselves: that children of unusual intelligence and accomplishments remain a misunderstood, marginalized resource in a culture obsessed with equity and prone to conformity. In fact, youthful prodigiousness is the leading edge of a wider cultural preoccupation with early high performance in our meritocratic era. Among the educated elite, the superchild has become the model child, and the model parent is an informed advocate with an eye trained on his or her child's future prospects. The unusual fate of the precocious child - to become adultified early and yet to remain hovered over for longer - is echoed in the situation of the privileged child, ushered along a highly scheduled path of credentialed performance from cradle onward, with college and career ever in mind.

In short, thanks not least to the gifted-child movement itself, the mission of discovering and molding precocious talent has been mainstreamed more successfully than anyone expected. Once in a while, the more mundane variety of Ivy League-aspiring kids and their ambitious parents pause to ask themselves whether the ethos entails too much early pressure to compete. For truly extraordinary kids, a different version of the question arises, but it is considered less often: could it be that in the quest to pinpoint and promote exceptional youthful promise, testers and contests and advocates may have unwittingly introduced early pressure to conform, not to the crowd but to an assiduously monitored, preprofessionalized and future-oriented trajectory? If the mold-breaking creativity and innovation that advocates invoke are what society wants more of, perhaps it is worth asking whether anointing the ranks of talent-search stars with a sense of foreordained distinction and steering them onto a prize- and degree-laden fast track, the earlier the better, may have its costs. Of course, it is every parent's hope to help satisfy highly gifted children's zeal for mastery and give them fulfilling childhoods, and programs like those the Davidson Institute runs help make that easier. But a look back over a century suggests it may be hubris if the goal of the guidance is to shape truly exceptional destinies in adulthood. Well-intentioned efforts to smooth the path and hone expertise in a hurry might even - who knows? - be a hindrance in the mysterious process by which mature originality ultimately expresses itself.

Long before 20th-century psychology turned its attention to young geniuses, children with extraordinary powers were enshrined in myth as figures to be at once feared and revered. Baby Hercules had occasion to display his prowess in strangling serpents because jealous Juno, angered that Jupiter had sired a son with a mere mortal, dispatched snakes to his cradle. Twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple after Passover, "sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions," invites not only astonishment "at his understanding and answers," but also rebukes from his bewildered parents; they're unsettled by his insistence that he "must be about my Father's business," well aware that he isn't referring to Joseph. In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the first early Christian attempt to fill in Jesus' life before that temple story, awe is mixed with terror. Jesus is an alarming little boy who doesn't merely make real birds out of clay and work other miracles but causes the death of those who scold him for not resting on the Sabbath and shames masters who try to instruct him in his letters. From the divine/demonic child of antiquity to the Romantic era's idealization of the innocent imaginative genius was perhaps not as big a leap as it seems: the prodigy was the very emblem of prophecy, in touch with mystical truth and powers outside of human time. In his different guises, the phenomenal young emissary came bearing an implicit message: adults beware.

Lewis Terman, however, was not a man readily daunted, and his endeavor embodied the ambitions and the confusions - and the elusive predictions - that have marked gifted research and development ever since. Five years after he revised Alfred Binet's intelligence test, creating what became known as the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test, he put it to use in a pioneering survey of a little-understood population. When Terman began seeking gifted California schoolchildren to participate in his "Genetic Studies of Genius" in 1921, he was undertaking the first youthful talent search, eager not just to explore the nature of gifted children but ultimately to predict and improve their chances of future greatness. Convinced that intellectual capacity was innate, he was a eugenicist eager to see the brightest selected out and trained up to guide society. But he was also aware that no one knew when or how, much less which, buds of brilliance might ultimately produce glorious flowers. Terman became determined to see to it that the proverb "early ripe, early rotten" wouldn't describe their fate. He would do his best to boost, not just stand back and trace, the trajectories of subjects, whose well-rounded giftedness augured such promise.

If that interfered with the purity of his findings and predictions, so, too, did Terman's methods for choosing his subjects. His approach made it less than surprising that the Termites, as the study participants were nicknamed, proved exemplary schoolchildren, not lopsided or eccentric at all. Terman's tool, the I.Q. test, was devised in and for an academic context, focusing on verbal and quantitative reasoning and memory skills, which meant scores at the high end correlated closely with classroom success. He was in search of the overall high performers, and his fieldwork further ensured a sample low on idiosyncratic characters. Since Terman didn't have the resources to comprehensively test the more than a quarter-million students in the California school districts he was looking at, he enlisted teachers to help make the first cut. They supplied him with the kids they considered the best, a group unlikely to include "some nerdy person in the corner mumbling to himself," points out Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in the scientific study of historical genius. Testing this cohort - as well as other batches of bright children he rounded up earlier - Terman emerged with an overwhelmingly white and middle-class sample of roughly 1,500 students whose average age was 11 and whose I.Q.'s ranged between 135 and 200, about the top 1 percent. (The mean I.Q. in this group was 151, and 77 subjects tested at 170 or higher.) It is worth noting that his methods selected for a conscientious breed of parents as well, given that lengthy questionnaires about their children were part of the drill.

The data reviewed in the first volume of findings, in 1925, demolished "the widespread opinion that typically the intellectually precocious child is weak, undersized or nervously unstable." Terman's inventories - of physical and personality traits, books read, intellectual and recreational interests, family background - revealed children physically superior as well as more trustworthy and honest, and much better at school (where about 85 percent of them had skipped grades) than a nongifted group used for a rough comparison. On the East Coast, a fellow psychologist, Leta Hollingworth of Columbia University Teachers College - a forerunner whom the Davidsons salute - chimed in with similar positive findings about the gifted students she studied in two public schools. For the rare specimens with I.Q.'s of 180 or higher, the record was somewhat more mixed on the question of social adjustment (more recent studies on "psychological well-being" continue to conflict); Hollingworth drew particular attention to the problem of disengagement at school. But home life in their samples' comparatively well-off and small families seemed enviable. "Fortunately," Hollingworth wrote, "the majority of gifted children fall by heredity into the hands of superior parents, who are themselves of fine character and worthy to 'set example.' "

With this portrait, the pioneers confronted a tension that exists to this day in the quest to rally support for the select cohort. Such a positive account of gifted children was good for their image, but less so for the message that, as Terman proclaimed at the close of the first volume, "the great problems of genius" require urgent attention. The young geniuses seemed to be doing nicely - perhaps all too competently, in fact. In the 1930 follow-up volume to "Genetic Studies of Genius," the Terman team betrayed a hint of defensiveness that reappeared in the 25-year and 35-year follow-ups. Anticipating later critics, they cautioned against undue expectations. "The title is not meant to imply that the thousand or more subjects who have entered into the investigations described are all potential geniuses in the more common meaning of that term. A few of the group may ultimately achieve that degree of distinction, but not more than a few."

The urge to forecast, then as now, drives research on childhood giftedness - yet as Malcolm Gladwell noted in a recent talk, precocity in general doesn't turn out to be a very reliable predictor of truly exceptional mature performance. When a colleague of Terman's, Catharine Cox, undertook the curious exercise of retrospectively computing the youthful I.Q.'s of 300 adult geniuses in the past (drawing on facts from their biographies), she found they were high - but far from the whole story. She also discovered the importance of other qualities, especially persistence and confidence. And she presciently warned that tests "cannot measure spontaneity of intellectual activity; perhaps, too, they do not sufficiently differentiate between high ability and unique ability, between the able individual and the extraordinary genius." Cox concluded that "the extraordinary genius who achieves the highest eminence is also the gifted individual whom intelligence tests may discover in childhood," with the crucial caveat that "the converse of this proposition is yet to be proved."

Focusing on a small cohort of children with I.Q.'s above 180, Hollingworth's case studies couldn't supply clear-cut evidence that a high-testing childhood was a precursor of later extraordinariness. The few she followed into early maturity excelled in their early 20's at academic and intellectual work, and won honors. But she wasn't sure what to conclude about creativity and originality, plainly disappointed that her sample didn't display more. She speculated that this was partly because of nurture: "so harnessed to the organized pursuit of degrees," in one child's case, and subjected to an "education so scrupulously supervised and so sedulously recorded that he had little time for original projects" in another. "The gifted group at midlife," as the Termites were called in the 35-year follow-up study, were highly educated for the time, professionally very successful and well adjusted. But the Terman team tried not to sound too let down that "a majority of gifted women prefer housewifery to more intellectual pursuits," right in step with postwar America.

In 1956, the year Terman died, a Nobel Prize was awarded to William Shockley, who as a California schoolboy didn't make the cut for the Termites but went on to help invent the transistor (and was later hailed as a catalyst in the creation of Silicon Valley, and also pilloried as a racist eugenicist). In 1968, another reject, Luis Alvarez, won the prize for his work in elementary particle physics. No Termite ever became a Nobel laureate, though some became well-published scientists and multiple patent holders. Alumni include journalists, poets and movie directors as well as professors, among whom psychologists have been particularly distinguished, perhaps not surprisingly. Terman, after all, pulled Stanford strings and did everything he could to help his protégés, who had been selected for what are often now called "schoolhouse gifts" and had grown up as a self-identified group imbued, not least by him, with expectations of academically approved achievement.

The fact that "the group has produced no great musical composer," as the study's authors wistfully noted, "and no great creative artist" perhaps wasn't so surprising, either. In part, of course, that is because such figures don't surface very often. In part, it was because "special abilities" weren't what they were testing for - the I.Q.'s appeal was its assessment of general cognitive ability, and the "globally gifted" child was the figure the Terman group fixed on. But in part it was also because when special talents were spotted in their high I.Q. mix, they resisted systematic analysis. Fewer than half of the kids who had shown distinctive artistic abilities stuck with those interests, though musicians were more likely to. (Even in music, the field best known for spawning prodigies, the yield of distinguished mature artists is low. Out of an unusually large concentration of 70 young musical marvels in the San Francisco area in the 1920's and 30's, only 6 went on to notable adult careers: Leon Fleisher, Ruth Slenczynska and Hephzibah Menuhin on the piano, and Isaac Stern, Ruggiero Ricci and Yehudi Menuhin on the violin.)

Terman and his colleagues focused on a batch of precocious literary girls. The researchers set out to compare their work with the juvenilia of eminent writers of the past. But quality and development tended to be highly uneven. That was obvious, for example, in a sampling of the 100 poems produced between ages 6 and 8 by the prolific Betty Ford, an engaging girl with an I.Q. of 188 who was said to skip and dance as she dictated her poetry, if she wasn't feverishly typing it out by herself. Nor did the juvenilia of the great provide a steady standard. In fact, a panel of judges rated poems by the young Longfellow and Shelley below those of Betty and other nobodys. As Terman's team concluded: "One would hardly be justified in attempting to devise methods for the prediction of adult literary accomplishment. Too many factors other than natural ability go to determine the amount and merit of achievement." The 8-year-old Betty herself suggested as much in "Blackbirds," which the judges rated among the poorest of her poems: "But to tell what I have in mind,/Is harder by far, than to guess/What the twitter of those birds mean,/As they spatter their words about."

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