The Goertzels state that three out of every five of the eminent people they studied had serious school problems, such as unsatisfactory curriculum, unsympathetic teachers, cruel classmates, and class failure, sometimes even in their areas of interest. That’s a lot of extremely talented people who didn’t like school! Reactions differed, often depending on the area of talent and background of the child. Perhaps we can learn something helpful from them.
These stories are found mostly in Chapter 10 of the book. In many cases I have simply typed the anecdotes almost verbatim, as my purpose here is not to present any original ideas of my own so much as to share some fascinating evidence and perhaps encourage someone who has a child who doesn’t fit the school mold, or who never fit that mold themselves.
When future-eminent children did like classrooms, what did they like? They appreciated teachers who let them go ahead at their own pace and gave them permission to work unimpeded in their area of special interest. They remember adults who introduced them to new and challenging ideas. They liked the parts of school where ideas were bandied about, such as the debate club or school newspaper. They liked to be needed and to have early responsibility. They appreciated those who could comment intelligently in their area of interest. And like all human beings, they liked those who took time to listen to what they had to say and who had faith in them.
The book really doesn’t give that many examples of people who are mentioned as specifically liking school, so it’s a little hard to draw conclusions about those who did. One such person is George Washington Carver. It’s not hard to see why he differed from most. He was raised by a foster father who paid to free him from slave kidnappers. Not all of his schools were stimulating, but he did not complain. He was happiest as a graduate student at Iowa State. Carver is likely an example of a student who looked at school as a relatively stable place where one met adults who read books. Bill Clinton may be another such example, though the book doesn’t list his biographical details and I was only able to find sketchy ones on Wikipedia. Oprah Winfrey is almost certainly one.
The second most school-friendly group, not too surprisingly, were the scientists. In their case, school brought specialized knowledge and equipment, mentoring, and other opportunities. It’s easy to see why the famous doctors required structured education, at least in their later years. But some of the pure scientists benefited as well. James Rutherford, the renowned physicist, had understanding teachers who recognized his interests and gave him one on one attention that his parents couldn’t have afforded through private tutors. He was also the recipient of several scholarships. Our current society values scientists highly, and scientific competitiveness is often mentioned in connection with school funding. These stories partially explain why people consider such funding so important. But even the scientists had many scathing things to say about school, particularly the more creative ones such as Albert Einstein.
Politicians and businesspeople, frankly, seemed to look at school as valuable mostly because it gave them an arena in which to organize others. Many of the future politicians and business leaders in the book did poorly in school. One wonders, in fact, whether they would still be admitted today into the schools they once attended, given the current pressure to be well-rounded and achieve perfect test scores and high grades.
Winston Churchill (who had an exceedingly interesting and dysfunctional family) was called the naughtiest boy in England by his dancing teacher. He was admitted to Harrow because his father was Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he remained in the lowest group in his class all his days at the school, a period he described as a wasted time and a miserable interlude. Yet all the time he was showing signs of his future abilities, including a love of martial poetry and a near total disregard for personal safety which almost killed him as a teen. Grover Cleveland crawled out the window during a particularly long prayer. Charles de Gaulle had mediocre grades, played pranks, and was generally unpopular. Not surprisingly, Josef Stalin was expelled from school for his political activities. None of Hitler’s teachers remembered him.
But the group who are most miserable in school were the creatives: writers, artists, actors, composers and reformers (who are creative in the way they think about society). These tended to be the children who came from the most traumatic backgrounds, by which I don’t mean underprivileged homes, but homes in which tragedies occurred, or unconventional ones. Often their parents, despite instability, were very dynamic and interesting people.
Here is a typical quote:
“I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes. But my schoolmates found me out from the very beginning...and they set about to make me see how unpleasant life ought to be made for anyone who is different from other people.” (Sigrid Undset)
A teacher shook thirteen-year-old Edvard Grieg and shouted at him when he found him completing his Opus 1, Variation of a German Melody for the Piano in class. Grieg was so resistant to school that he used to stand under the rainspout in order to get so wet that the teacher would send him home to change clothes.
Many, including Salvador Dali, Ignace Jan Paderewski and Sarah Bernhardt, were expelled. Others were dropouts or truants.
American writers Stephen Crane, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all failed classes in college because they did not enjoy the content of the courses they took. Emile Zola faced repeated failures in the French lycee system.
Pablo Picasso’s father, an artist himself, wanted his son to be well-educated so that he would be better able to support his future family than the father was, but Pablo resisted school and seemed completely unable to learn to read or write. The other students grew used to seeing him come to school late with his pet pigeon (a model) and a paintbrush. He spent much of his time in the kitchen with the schoolmaster’s wife, watched the clock, and if asked to pay attention, tried so hard that all he could think about was paying attention!
The least recognized and often the most unhappy children were those who had an early empathy that other children did not have. Adults praised Albert Schweizer when he could substitute for the church organist at age nine, yet he was punished or ridiculed when he refused to wear the proper clothes that his parents so painfully provided for him, when he insisted on begin as poorly clad as the village boys, and when he would not join in robbing birds’ nests.
The stubborn boys who failed because they would not scatter their energies seemed especially important because it was often they who made the giant steps forward which changed life significantly for the total population. These include Edison, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford and Einstein.
Einstein and Edison, of course, are legendary for having been thought dull in school, and many people know the quote that begins, “It is...nothing sort of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry...” but in light of the modern definition of school success as the ability to manage a heavy and varied workload, I particularly like the last part of the quote: “It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and duty.” Einstein saw the value of a perpetual sense of wonder.
Einstein said of his entrance examinations at Zurich: “The constraint was so terrifying that after I passed the final examination I found myself unable to think of a scientific problem for almost a year.” Richard Feynman had a similar period of scientific burnout, which came to an end as he was spinning a plate in a cafeteria and became intrigued by the relationship between its spin and its wobble.
Eminent people often did appreciate tutors more than they did classroom situations. And most who were taught at home were thankful for the opportunity, provided that their parents eventually let them grow up and express themselves as separate people. Dimitri Shostakovitch’s mother, who was bemoaned her children going out and having fun even after they were married, didn’t. Grandparents and community mentors are also positive influences.
The eminent benefited from what the authors term a “time-out,” an extended period when the normal schedule is suspended and the boy or girl is free to think, read or do something entirely novel. Many times the free period came because the young person was sick: Henri Matisse studied painting during a convalescence. Winston Churchill spent time listening to relatives in Parliament, and discovered himself intellectually, after rupturing a kidney. Other times, the catalyst was travel: Albert Einstein traveled around Italy at sixteen after he almost had a nervous breakdown. William Randolph Hearst wandered around New York City. Marie Curie had a free year in the country at fifteen. Richard Byrd traveled around the world alone at thirteen! None of these circumstances is as common today as they would have been in previous centuries. No wonder so many favorite children’s books are full of stories of sick, orphaned and otherwise unscheduled children! To me, such times to ponder are perhaps the most attractive opportunity that homeschooling affords.
An interesting question posed at the end of the book is, how have things changed since these eminent people grew up? What do compulsory education, lockstep curriculum, and crowded schedules add to the mix?
The majority of eminent people still come from professional homes where the parents encourage their children to love learning. But increasingly, it is becoming evident that something has gone wrong with the tradition of self-education among professionals. Students coming from professional homes are too frequently uninterested and unimaginative. They can pass tests and make the grades required to get into good schools, but they remain uninvolved in the learning process. They are after credentials, primarily in order to enjoy the social and economic benefits that they bring. This is even, or perhaps especially, true at expensive and competitive schools.
Teachers, in studies, preferred children of high intelligence, but low creativity. One reason is obvious: Creative children rock the boat. They are energetic, ask hard questions, daydream or play the class clown, and may alienate themselves through their own rude behavior. They make coordinated activities more difficult for the teacher, whereas intelligent but conventional children make the teacher look good and feel needed.
Another reason is that, in what anthropologists tell us is the most peer-oriented culture in the world, children become almost afraid to think until they learn what their classmates are thinking. Needless to say, peer pressure is a creativity killer. Consider the word “nerd,” which, I dislike because it allows the opponents of real learning to frame the debate. Highly achieving adults often have a great joy in their work and retain a childish pleasure in learning which may make them seem naive to the public. If teachers can’t strangle the holy curiosity of inquiry, peers can stomp on it pretty thoroughly, especially if the parents buy the line that peer adjustment is of paramount importance.
One question that the Goertzels never answer is, what happens to the children who share these risk-taking traits, but never become eminent? Perhaps we can glean a partial answer by looking at the siblings of these eminent people. Some were minor eminences in their own right, while others were broken by the same circumstances that made their siblings great. Some may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time for eminence. Others may simply have chosen self-directed goals that didn’t bring them fame.
Certainly many sensible parents will object, this is all very interesting, but shouldn’t our children have a Plan B? Perhaps so, and certainly such parents as Pablo Picasso’s or Edgar Degas’ promoted such plans, but there is one thing to consider: Perhaps people who become pioneers in their field do so partly because they have no realistic alternative. At any rate, they are not afraid of failure. One prominent trait of the people in the Goertzels’ book is that they have a higher rate than the general population of fathers who were failures (though they may have sprung back). The authors speculate that facing the instability of such as situation may remove the fear of failure somewhat from their children. Creativity, in any area, requires risk. What separates the people in this book from talented but conventional students who get into elite colleges today is that they are extremely persistent in pursuing their own goals. You can't formulate these people.
The most prominent traits of all the eminent people described in this book are single-mindedness and suffering. The authors make it clear, however, that they are not advocating purposeful trauma in order to make children famous! A conventional, reasonably competent child is certainly more likely to be “happy” in the usual sense. There are plenty of people who are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, creative in daily life, but their interests are not all-consuming. But one thing I like about this book is that, since life brings a certain amount of suffering to everyone, it points out possible redeeming qualities even in the most difficult situations.
And what can a Christian make of this long tale of misery and ambition, punctuated by the joy of discovery? In some cases, it’s hard to say. Fame in itself is a dubious goal, but it’s not at all clear that even the people profiled were after fame so much as the opportunity to focus on their work. There was lots of depression in this book, lots if illness and death, a fair amount of political oppression, and several suicides. Many of the eminent were in rebellion against conventional mores, but it’s hard to tell whether they were rebelling against prevailing stodgy attitudes or Christianity itself. Sometimes they threw the baby out with the bath-water. Certainly no Christian wants to raise an Adolf Hitler, and one trait of the dictators seems to have been mothers who hated their husbands and focused all their attention onto their sons. Such stories bring to mind my pastor’s sermons about idol worship. But I think the most valuable way to look at the biographies in this book is to see that God doesn’t so often remove us from our difficulties as He comes alongside us. If we find ourselves or our families in a difficult situation, we can do no better than to look to Him.
2 In vain you rise early
and stay up late,
toiling for food to eat—
for he grants sleep to [a] those he loves.
