Curing the Disease of Precocity

For over half a century academic psychologists have linked the concept of precocity to that of the intelligence quotient; to study precocious children has been to study "gifted" children, those marked by IQs of 140 or over.1 As a rule of thumb, the more recent the publication, the less will it reflect alarm or even curiosity about the dangers that face precocious children. In contrast, prior to 1930 most experts believed that precocious children were born losers. Lewis Terman's demonstration (Terman et al. 1926) that gifted children were physically healthier, socially better adjusted, and likelier to emerge as leaders than their less talented peers initially ran against the grain and only gradually gained acceptance. It was ironic that it fell to Terman to assail the customary association of precocity and early decay, for he had done his graduate work at Clark University, where President G. Stanley Hall had elevated the axiom "Early ripe, early rot" to a scientific doctrine. Child prodigies were in bad repute at Clark University, Terman wrote, "because of the prevailing belief that they were usually psychotic or otherwise abnormal and almost sure to burn themselves out quickly or to develop postadolescent stupidity" (1965, p. 10). On one level, this downgrading of precocity was an offshoot of the genetic psychology which Hall enthroned at Clark and which influenced H. H. Goddard (Ph.D., Clark, 1899) and Arnold Gesell (Ph.D., Clark, 1906). The implications of genetic psychology for intelligence, and indirectly for efforts to stimulate precocious development, were straightforward. Patterns of learning and behavior were thought to unfold more or less automatically as a function of mental development. Clark psychologists inclined to the view that intelligence was fixed or nearly so, a mere secretion of somatic cerebral structure. In addition, they thought that mental development was genetically determined. Goddard, who first brought the Binet-Simon intelligence scale to America, was an ardent hereditarian, and in his writings he gave mental testing a linkage to hereditarianism that endured beyond HalFs death in 1924 (Hunt 1961, pp. 11-14, 43-44, 65). Hence attempts to accelerate early intellectual development were doomed to failure because they infracted natural laws of growth. Yet on another level the animus of Hall 1 In practice, school systems often admitted children with IQs much lower than 140 to special programs for the gifted; see Goddard (1928, p. 49). ? 1978 by The University of Chicago. 0002-9602/79/8407-0006$02.28