The Curse of Genius
Le génie peut-il être une malédiction ?
Les enfants prodiges, ces petits génies capables d’obtenir des diplômes universitaires, de résoudre des équations ou de parler plusieurs langues avant l’âge de dix ans fascinent notre société, où l’intelligence est une vertu prisée. Mais qui sont réellement ces jeunes que tout le monde admire ? Il semblerait que le génie puisse aussi être une malédiction...
Tom is 11. At home, his favourite way to relax is to devise maths exam papers complete with marking sheets. Tom is an only child, and at first Chrissie, his mother, thought his love of numbers was normal. Gradually she realised it wasn’t. One day his parents took him to have his intelligence tested. “We told him it was a day of puzzles,” Chrissie says. “It was my dream world,” Tom says. “Half a day of tests!” His mother waited while he applied his mind to solving problems. When they were shown the results, Tom’s intelligence put him in the top 0.1% in Britain. 2. Some countries value extremely high intelligence more than others and offer specific educational provision for such children. Yet even if your genius is prized, admired and cultivated, social and psychological issues that often accompany great
ability may make it an unwelcome gift. From the inside – and for many families that I spoke to – genius can feel more like a curse than a blessing.
3. Most experts reserve the term “gifted” for children who demonstrate three characteristics. First, gifted children begin to master a particular discipline – a language, maths or chess – much younger than most. They do so easily, so they also progress much faster than their peers. Secondly, this mastery is achieved largely on their own, rather than as a result of parental prodding. Many children who have extremely high IQs show signs of extraordinary ability even as tiny babies, before pushy parenting is able to have much impact. A third characteristic of
ability ici, capacités, aptitudes, facultés / unwelcome indésirable / gift don / blessing bénédiction. 3. to master maîtriser / chess échecs / so ici, cela / peer ici, enfant du même âge / to achieve ici, acquérir / largely en grande partie / on one's own seul / rather than plutôt que / prodding encouragements, incitation (forte), pression / tiny tout petit / pushy (trop) ambitieux / parenting éducation / to be able to pouvoir. gifted children is that their interests often seem near-obsessive. They have what is sometimes called “a rage to master”.
4. “The original gifted children will have invented the wheel and discovered fire,” says Kendall. But even Kendall, who is in the business of evaluating children, admits that “testing IQ is not like measuring height”. No assessment is completely objective. Most tests look only at particular types of intelligence, such as mathematical and verbal reasoning. We don’t yet have a way to measure creative, artistic or emotional intelligence. The sorts of children we rate as “geniuses” tend to be only those who fall into the standard categories.
A DIFFERENT PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD
5. Many of these parents face two main difficulties. One is how to cater to the advanced intellectual development of their child. The second dimension is more rarely voiced but may cause just as many problems: exceptionally intelligent children are often socially isolated, even disruptive. Gifts that are admired in the abstract often seem less welcome in person.
6. A gifted child may have an advanced ability to master something like maths, but more limited capacity to deal with their social environment which is another important part of growing up and fitting in over the course of their lives. “A gifted child might be prone to complete
4. wheel roue / height ici, taille / assessment évaluation, appréciation (fig.) / to look at ici, se focaliser sur / reasoning raisonnement / to rate évaluer; ici, "classer", "catégoriser", considérer / to tend to tendre à.
5. to face être confronté à / to cater to ici, répondre/réagir à / to voice évoquer / to cause engendrer / just as many tout autant / disruptive perturbateur / to seem sembler, paraître; ici, s'avérer être.
6. to deal, dealt, dealt with gérer, affronter / to fit in ici, trouver sa place, s'intégrer / over the course of au cours de / to be prone to être sujet à / social meltdowns,” says Anguera. “They can’t understand how other children work, and they can’t control their emotions.” Being exceptionally able in some areas means they need “the right support” in others, she says.
7. The emotional and physical health associations with genius don’t stop there. The American branch of Mensa, which has more than 50,000 members, refers to its affiliates as having “hyper brains”. A recent survey of its members suggested that people with exceptionally high intelligence very often have what Kazimierz Dabrowski, a Polish psychologist, dubs “over-excitabilities” or “super-sensibilities”, such as a heightened awareness of one of the five senses, experiencing extremely meltdown effondrement (ici, émotionnel) / area domaine / support soutien, aide. 7. health (de) santé / brain cerveau / survey étude, enquête / to dub appeler / over-excitability hyperstimulabilité / heightened exacerbé / awareness ici, sensibilité / to experience ici, ressentir.
emotions or having very high levels of energy.
8. Sonja Falck is wary of the word “gifted” because “it connotes privilege”, in that the gifted person is seen as having an advantage over everyone else. But it’s not necessarily an advantage. “Someone who is gifted, but who grows up in an environment that is not supportive, can really suffer. This suffering is hugely under-acknowledged.”
9. Emily’s son Peter is nine. Since he was tiny he has preferred adult company to that of his peers: “At nursery, he used to sob all morning,” says Emily. Physically fragile and a loner, he has ended up in hospital three times after being beaten up at school. In common with many gifted children he has difficulty eating because he is hypersensitive to food textures. But for Peter, as for many other children, the greatest problem is that humdrum, day-to-day life is so hard to deal with. He finds school crushingly dull. His head teacher doesn’t see that this is a problem. “A bit of boredom is quite good for you,” he told Emily.
10. How best to educate a gifted child? The challenges are complex and often competing. On the one hand they are able to master material sooner and more rapidly than their peers. On the other, because the social skills of many such children are poorly developed, it can be extremely difficult for them to be a child in the traditional sense, to fit in and to learn many of the nonverbal, non-testable skills that social activity teaches you in preparation for being an adult. And without meaning to, such children may come across as too smart and, even with the best of intentions, other kids and adults may simply not wish to be around. Adults, especially teachers, may find extremely clever children threatening: a small child talking to you as an equal can put you on the back foot. They literally know more than the adults around them and can’t help but tell them so.
11. Some countries have cultivated an educational environment that is welcoming to gifted children. Singapore runs a highly selective programme designed to identify the most exceptionally intelligent students each year. At the age of eight or nine all children are assessed in maths, English and reasoning. The top 1% are transferred from “normal” classes to the Gifted Education Programme which is run in nine primary schools up to the age of 12.
12. What will become of gifted children? Raj Chetty, an American economist at Harvard University has calculated that those who score in the top 5% of standard tests at primary school are many times more likely than the other 95% to file patents as adults – and that probability is far higher among bright kids from rich families. Whatever their natural talents, chilintense dren whose aptitudes are nurtured and given opportunities have a far better chance in life.
13. But in the 1920s Lewis Terman, an American psychologist, studied 1,500 children with very high intelligence. Others followed up that group 70 years later. They found that they had accomplished no more than their socio-economic status would have predicted.
14. And an unhappy childhood stays with you. Kim Ung-yong was a child prodigy in South Korea. Now a civil engineer in his 50s, he feels he was cheated of a childhood. He began speaking at six months and had mastered four languages by the age of two. He gained his first PhD aged eight, and was then headhunted to work for NASA. “I led my life like a machine,” he has said. “I woke up, solved the daily assigned equation, ate, slept…I was lonely and had no friends.” Even Albert Einstein, one of the most emblematic examples of genius, wrote in 1952: “It is strange to be known so universally and yet be so lonely.”
“The original gifted children will have invented the wheel and discovered fire.”