ABNORMALLY BRIGHT CHILDREN
What is commonly considered abnormal brightness in a school child is
often a tendency to live an abnormal physical life. Being a child
bookworm means that time is spent indoors that should be spent playing
games with one's fellows. Excellence in the activities of children, not
ability to imitate the activities of adults, should be the test of
child brightness. To be able to hit a bull's-eye, to throw a ball
accurately, to calculate the swing of a curve or the bound of a
"grounder," these are tests of brightness quite as indicative of mental
power as the ability to win highest marks in school, while less
injurious to physical power. The child who is abnormally bright
requires special treatment just as much as the child who is abnormally
dull. The former as well as the latter must have his abnormal condition
corrected if he is to grow into a normally bright man.
The college man who sacrifices health to "marks" is thus described by
the director of physical training at Harvard University:
A drooping head, a pale face, dull, sunken eyes, flat chest and
rounded shoulders, with emaciated limbs, soft flabby muscles, and
general lack of good physical, mental, and moral tone.
For the protection of these physical defective grinds it is suggested
to put a physical qualification upon the candidates of Phi Beta Kappa
and their awards of scholarship. If scholarship men cannot be induced
to take time to improve their physique for fear of lowering their
college standing, then give them credit for standing in physical work.
The abnormally bright, at whatever age, is as much a subject for
examination and treatment as the child with adenoids and pulmonary
tuberculosis. Such attention will increase the percentage of abnormally
bright schoolmates who figure in active business in later life.
Moreover, it will decrease the number of high school superintendents
who declare that their honor pupils are physical wrecks.
There are children who develop very rapidly, both physically and
mentally, and whose mental superiority is not at the expense of their
bodies. Protection of such children requires that their minds be
permitted to progress as rapidly as bodily health justifies. It is as
cruel to keep back a physically and mentally superior child, as to push
the physically or mentally defective beyond his powers. Worry and
fatigue can be produced by lack of interest as well as by overwork.
"Normal" should not be confused with "average." To keep a bright child
back with the average child--marking time till the dull ones catch
up--is to make him abnormal. The tests that we have employed for
grading pupils are either the tests of age in years or of mental
capacity. The first takes no account of slowness or rapidity of
physiological development,--of physiological age. The second encourages
mental activity at the expense of physique. The entrance of a child
into school, the promotion from one class to another, the entrance into
college, are thus determined either by the purely artificial test of
age or by the individual teacher's discretion. There is nothing to
prevent the ambitious teacher or the ambitious parent from pushing a
child into kindergarten at four, high school at twelve, college at
fifteen. If this cannot be done at the public school, a private school
is resorted to. A community of college professors once started a school
for faculty children. A tremendous pressure was put upon these scions
of intellectual aristocracy to enter the high school at twelve. No
thought was given to the ventilation of the school. The windows were
so arranged that they could not be opened without the air blowing on
some child's back. "You could cut the air with a knife" was a
description given by one sensible professor who had taken his sturdy
girl of seven away from the school, because he feared that in this
environment she would become like the other little puny, pale,
undersized children of that school.
The University of Pennsylvania has instituted a psychological clinic.
Parents and teachers are invited to bring any deviation from the usual
or the expected to the attention of this clinic. Every month a bulletin
is published called the _Psychological Clinic_, which will be found of
great service in dealing with the abnormally bright as well as with the
abnormally dull. Naturally the well-to-do and the rich are the first to
take advantage of these special facilities for ascertaining just what
work should be done by a precocious child or by the mentally and
morally retarded.
Abnormal brightness means power to be happy and to be serviceable that
is above the average. Every school can be a miniature psychological
clinic. While every teacher cannot be an expert, national and state
superintendents can constantly remind teachers that the abnormally
bright are also abnormally apt to neglect physical welfare and to
endanger future mental power.