Is Your Child the Einstein of the Future?

... "In any family there may be a gifted child, and the parents not know it," says John Lewellen, who selected 387 youngsters made known by radio and television. Here are some of the signs that show whether your little one is among the prodigies...

It is not necessary for parents to be graduates of the higher universities in order to produce intelligent children, or prodigies and great men, for the mental tests carried out on hundreds of children in America have shown that genius has very often been found among the children of the toiling class, of little culture and slender means.

What wounds and pains, however, is that there should exist, in some family, a child of extraordinary intelligence whom his parents fail to discover — it is his teacher or his neighbor who does... And often the parents have been a destructive force against their child's intelligence — even without meaning to be — by failing to encourage him and take him by the hand. This does not mean that parents can create a genius out of one of their children; but they can kill genius and brilliance in him by suppressing them, out of ignorance and carelessness. Has it never happened, dear reader, that you heard it said: "Strange — he is extraordinarily intelligent, yet he has stayed where he is!" And what are the reasons for that?? The reasons are the negligence of parents or teachers in discovering those gifts and making them grow!!! The psychologist Lewellen has known hundreds of youngsters whom nature endowed with extraordinary intelligence and who later became great men... He knew a little boy named Gerard Darrow who could distinguish and name 365 kinds of birds at the age of four, and who at the age of eight was one of the leading authorities on the Greek story.

As for Joel Kupperman, who is now fourteen years old and has 30,000 dollars deposited in a bank until he comes of age, he could not walk or utter a word until he was 17 months old; his parents worried over him no end, thinking him below normal... At the age of five Joel showed extraordinary intelligence in mathematics, and at seven he was reading the history taught in the upper grades of school and remembering every event in it and its causes. The psychologists who studied him said that his intelligence surpassed that of any other youngster who had been given an intelligence test up to that time... So let the mothers whose little ones are late in walking and talking take heart!!

These two youngsters do not differ in their behavior from other children, and they expect neither praise nor coddling. They are two of the 387 youngsters discovered by Mr. Lewellen, who says that society must not expect these youngsters to behave older than their years because they are intelligent — or rather, more intelligent than others; they do not grasp the greatness of their own intelligence, and so they ask of others neither praise nor ceremony...

This Mr. Lewellen is a child psychology expert of forty, calm of temper, slight of build, exceedingly fond of children, who feels the responsibility laid upon his shoulders as an examiner of children's intelligence, or what is called in English the I. Q. He has recently written a book called "You and Atomic Power," in which he explains to youngsters what use we can make of atomic power other than killing off the world. He himself is a man of extraordinary intelligence, accomplished in music, who pilots his own private airplane. He lives with his wife and two children in the district of Glen Ellyn on the outskirts of Chicago, and he is the only man in the United States who owns two television sets, one in the sitting room and the other on the lower floor of the house, where his two little ones play — the two on whom he applies the results of his testing and study, assisted in this by his wife, who has been and remains his right hand in carrying out mental tests on children... Her method of raising the child rests on giving him the fullest information about everything he asks about, drawing on the encyclopedias if need be...

Fathers find great difficulty in getting their little ones to carry out the duties laid upon them as their parents portion them out; yet if they are left to themselves to divide their time according to their own need of it, they perform everything asked of them with complete faithfulness, and finish all their duties.

There was one little girl who often chafed at her piano lesson, since she had to practice an hour every day. When she was left to herself, she began to practice as her free time allowed — several hours a day, while sometimes the day would pass without her sitting at the piano for a single minute. But she kept progressing, even if slowly; and in this way the quarreling in the house lessened, and the little girl no longer felt that she was performing a hateful duty, but rather that she was studying something useful and profitable...

And now, what are the signs of a youngster's brightness? Mr. Lewellen says they are: depth in answering certain questions and refusal to be content with superficialities; quickness of understanding; curiosity; the taking in of new information; strength of memory; retention of the greatest possible number of words; an extraordinary delight in encyclopedias, geography books with maps, and other books; the ability to read without prior training; and walking and talking early.

Among the signs of intelligence, too, are alertness, quickness in answering together with originality of opinion, gaiety of spirit, and a love of reading.

Mr. Lewellen believes that educating the youngster at the hands of a private tutor is a very mistaken method, because the youngster is thereby cut off from social life and from choosing his own friends. And if he is then sent to school at the age of nine, he dislikes his companions out of aversion to them, and this leads him to hate his school...

The school helps the youngster's talents to grow in cooperation with the home... If the youngster fails in his lessons, scolding will not bring him to earn high marks; in that case he needs the consolation and help of his parents and their affection, just as if he had been hurt in a fall in the street, for instance. Moreover, his parents' help, given with affection and tenderness, and their standing by him in his work, lead him to a better and more profitable result.

Days may come when the youngster falls prey to sharp fits of nerves after a long lesson or a strain of thinking. Or even the intelligent among them may fail in one of their school years; and to such parents Lewellen says: "Do not press the little ones to study more. Let them rest, and their nature will afterward return to what it was..."

The youngsters' talents may be discovered as the result of a surprise or an unusual incident, as happened to little Lonny Lunde when he was four years old. He came home one evening with his parents from a concert, and no sooner had he entered the house than he rushed to the piano to play on it a tune he had heard at the concert; and within a week he had mastered the tune exactly as he had heard it, to the astonishment of his parents, for he had never in his life gone near the piano... He is now fifteen years old, able to play any tune he hears and to name both the tune and its composer. Had there been no piano in his parents' house, little Lonny could not have shown that beautiful gift, and his parents could not have discovered it and made it grow...

Parents must not press the youngster to study, for pressure breeds in him hatred of his lesson and his school. The youngster must be trained, not treated harshly, and must feel that his parents treat him as their equal, possessing the same thought, mind, and standing. In this way they win for him confidence in himself and reliance upon it...

From among these intelligent youngsters have come the skillful physician, the brilliant lawyer, the engineer, the university professor, and others who have distinguished themselves in the various professional fields and grown rich from the toil of their hands and brains. Divorce, moreover, has rarely found its way into their married lives. Research has proved that those gifted ones who have distinguished themselves in life are the ones who were encouraged and who met with great care from understanding parents, and from teachers who knew the child's psychology and what it needs at each stage of its growth...

There are now in the United States schools that devote their efforts to training youngsters whose genius appears early. At the same time, they redouble their care for those who are below normal, in the hope of finding among those inert brains a fertile soil that will yield much once it has received its full share of plowing and fertilizing... Society needs every hand to help in raising the new generation — and perhaps among those children is one of your own, dear reader.