Freeman pointed out that it is easy to squelch this fire by stuffing children to the gills with school-type learning. It’s easy to ruin a life by treating a person, no matter how gifted, as a brain on a stick. “After all these years,” she wrote, “I am certain that to take just one aspect of a child’s life, giftedness, as a basis for making decisions which will affect them for the rest of their lives is to risk their emotional balance, and even their success in life.”
The bottom line is that we need to put intelligence in its place. We need to value it and put precocious children in settings where they are nurtured and stretched. But we don’t want to overvalue it. In my view, it’s crazy that many top universities look for students who scored over 1300 or 1400 on their SATs and reject most applicants below that. That’s placing too high a value on a narrow aspect of ability.
When you look at who really achieves great…
