Georgia Mills, 18.
Cover Story
The price of prodigy
by Matt Nippert
Continued from page 2...
“Even if your own net worth is failing to keep up with the Einsteins next door, you can take solace in the fact that while the Einsteins’ son is barely speaking in complete sentences, your son is reading Heidegger.”
Quart writes that the pressure on children to be “gifted” has spawned a harmful industry of preschool education supplements that she dubs the “Baby Genius Edutainment Complex”. Encouraging children to fly higher than is natural risks reprising Icarus.
New Zealander Roydon McLaughlin began university aged 16 (he did not attend George Parkyn). Now 22, he is behind bars. Over a two-year period beginning in 2004, the accountant created a web of 34 front trusts, companies and partnerships to claim more than $500,000 in GST returns from the IRD.
According to the NZ Herald, he told the court that his fraud came as a consequence of experimenting to better understand accounting practice. His mother, Diane, flew in from Australia to speak at his sentencing at the Tauranga District Court and said that as a child he was very precocious.
“He kept needing challenges in his life to keep him interested in what he was doing,” she said.
Curiosity was one explanation for his actions. Feeding an addiction to gambling was another. Only $16,000 was recovered by police, and last month McLaughlin was sentenced to 34 months in prison.
Brandenn Bremmer, a homeschooled US prodigy and only child who had just begun medical school, committed suicide in 2005, aged 14. Eric Konigsberg, writing in the New Yorker, profiled the boy posthumously and drew particular attention to the social and intellectual isolation that Bremmer experienced in his later years.
“Many articles have been published during the past two decades on the subject of suicide among gifted children,” he wrote. “And although there is no good evidence for it, some people think that their rate of suicide may be higher than average.”
A 1959 study by psychologist Lewis M Terman of more than 1500 gifted children, found after 35 years, however, that while some were leading troubled lives, their rate of mental illness, alcoholism, poverty and crime was lower than in the wider population.
Yet there is evidence that expectations of brilliance can prove counter-productive to success in the classroom. Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, tested hundreds of children to see how they responded to being identified as smart.
After answering 10 questions from an IQ test, some were commended for their hard work while the others were told they were intelligent. The children were then asked if they wanted to tackle a more difficult task. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent were up for the challenge. By contrast, the “smart” crowd were reluctant. Dweck told the Washington Post last month that: “They seemed to be thinking, ‘They called me smart. I better not do anything too hard in case they change their minds.’”
Miraca Gross, author of Exceptionally Gifted Children, has found that gifted children reading fluently when they start school are likely to stop in an attempt to fit in, unless a teacher immediately notices and encourages them. It’s “scary”, she told the Sydney Morning Herald, “because this happens in the first couple of weeks.”
Quart says: “There are actually very few deeply ‘gifted’ kids with transcendent cognitive or artistic abilities. The label is sometimes useful in education, but as an internal self-image it’s not.”
Perhaps as a defence against unrealistic expectations, and perhaps as part of New Zealand modest egalitarianism, most of the kids from the crypt reject the “gifted” tag.
Georgia Mills, 18, was the only girl in her class at George Parkyn 11 years ago. “I have had expectations from my parents to some extent when it was decided I was gifted,” she says. “Sometimes I wish I had been one of the kids, who when they passed, people went, ‘Well done, you must have worked really hard.’”
Now studying accountancy at the University of Auckland, she threw herself into extracurricular activities at Westlake Girls’ High, becoming director of the school’s Stage Challenge last year – there’s no denying her gift of the gab – and being appointed deputy head girl.
“I’m not saying I struggled at school, but I’m not among the top students who’ll find the cure for cancer,” she says.
Glen Dalby, a red-headed 20-year-old, says that after attempting to pursue an interest in architecture, he found himself neither gifted nor talented. “The problem was, I couldn’t draw. I flunked graphic design. Twice. I tried a third time, but that only lasted two weeks.”
After middling results at Howick College, Dalby spent a year stacking shelves and gigging in a metal covers band while exploring how to become an air traffic controller. He decided to take to the air by enrolling at Ardmore Flying School. After topping the class in his most recent exam, he is five months away from graduating as a commercial pilot.
“There were expectations I’d do well. And I don’t think I really hit them until I left school,” he says.
Simon Carpinter, in the third year of a software engineering degree at Auckland University, says: “My parents believe very strongly in academics, but I’d think they’d follow me no matter what I did. “
