Fast Learners

There are 29,000,000 U. S. public schoolchildren, but the Speyer School is the only U. S. public school for children mentally gifted.* It was created in Manhattan in February 1936 by the city's Board of Education and Columbia's Teachers College, and since that time grey-haired, motherly Professor Leta Stetter Hollingworth has carefully guarded her brood from the adulatory and meddlesome attentions of the public. But this week, entranced by the educational message in a series of unposed candid-camera pictures of her 8 t011-year-old charges taken during the past few months, Professor Hollingworth exhibited the photographs in the college and for the first time gave outsiders a glimpse of what gifted children look like, what they can do.

The pictures bore no resemblance to the popular caricature of child prodigies with spectacles and top-heavy craniums. More handsome than the average, Speyer's merry-faced youngsters were shown running and laughing like the perennially peptic urchins in magazine advertisements. Only their activities were unusual--playing chess, repairing engines, writing poetry, composing music, reading heavy volumes.

Dr. Hollingworth picked her 50 prodigious children last year from more than 600 applicants for the Speyer School. Their I.Q.s were from 130 to 200, the highest recorded rating, indicating potential genius. Chosen from regular New York City classrooms, they came from homes in all economic levels. Nor were they racially or nationally homogeneous. There were two Negro girls from Jamaica and a Negro boy from Haiti.

In most cases they were the parents' only child, a characteristic phenomenon among bright children, says Dr. Hollingworth. Many of them had not struck their parents as remarkable. Nor had they been particularly noted by their teachers, who observed only that, from having skipped grades, they were two or three years younger than their classmates. One 8-year-old lad, who had developed from the age of four a gift for drawing maps, had long been in conflict with his teacher over his habit of drawing them in the classroom after he finished his lessons. Said he: "When the teacher said, 'I must kill this map-drawing in you,' I felt bad. She can't kill map-drawing in me. Nobody can."

The Speyer group, aged 7 to 9 and taken from grades 1A to 6B, has worked well together. The children come to school in a building on Columbia's Morningside Heights from all parts of the city, eat lunch together. Even 8-year-olds travel alone on the subway between home and school.

Under selected public-school teachers who must be able to keep their poise when the children flash bits of unfamiliar information on them, the pupils are covering the regular school curriculum (minus reading, in which they need no instruction) in one-half the normal time. Thus they are free to spend the rest of the day investigating things the elementary public-school child seldom learns--French, poetry, music appreciation (via radio) and are doing independent research into such common aspects of civilization as lighting, transportation. Ninety per cent read newspapers daily, discourse on the Chinese war and the Roosevelt fiscal policy.

Given the run of public libraries, these youngsters amaze librarians by using card catalogs, finding their own books and digesting thick, technical tomes whose words normal children cannot even pronounce. In their research they have exposed eight errors in a standard encyclopedia. The group will be kept together for five years (during which no new classes are to be formed because of lack of funds). At the end of that time all will be able to enter high school together. But each will have gone far beyond minimum high-school entrance requirements.

Nebraska-born Mrs. Hollingworth became interested in bright children in 1913, when, as a young psychologist, she tested feeble-minded children in New York hospitals for commitment to institutions and wondered why gifted youngsters did not receive as much attention. Later, teaching educational psychology in Teachers College, she and Principal Jacob Theobald of nearby P. S. 165 established a special class for the bright in Mr. Theobald's school. It was later abandoned.

Dr. Hollingworth declares that after the Speyer demonstration, public-school systems will never again be satisfied to let gifted children waste their time in the normal routine. Other cities already are preparing to form special classes. In New York City, says Dr. Hollingworth, there are 10,000 children, 1% of the school population with I. Q.s over 130. She insists they should not be called prodigies or geniuses but "fast learners." Some may be geniuses but it is not possible to tell yet. All, however, will be the intellectual workers of the future. The children of the old bright class in P. S. 165 are now at the top of their classes in college.

*Speyer also has a division for the very backward.

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