The Training of Very Bright Children.1
- Author:
Lightner Witmee.
What children are very bright? Our own, of course, but how to discover the “very bright” children of other people? To be very definite, what percentage of six-year-old children, in the first grade of the public schools of this country, may we expect to be properly classified among the “very bright?”
Before I can answer this question, we must arrive at a satisfactory definition of the “very bright” child. To define the very bright child, we must also define the bright child, the ordinary child, and those children who are inferior to the ordinary. The definition of “brightness” requires a psychological analysis of the mental competency of children.
I propose, first, to define the ordinary child, for which purpose I take the norm already established by the school system. The ordinary, or normal, child is one who is able to enter school at the age of six years, and, taught by a recent normal school graduate of ordinary mental ability and moderate professional efficiency, is able, along with forty or more other children, to do the prescribed work of the first year, in not more than nine months, five hours a day, five days a week, attaining, at the end of the period, a proficiency adequate to begin the prescribed curriculum of the second school year. It follows from this definition, that a child isn’t an ordinary child, if he requires two years or more to do the prescribed work of the first grade; nor is he an ordinary child if he can do the prescribed work under the conditions in less than the prescribed time. The learning rate of a child determines his rate of progress through the grades. It measures the child’s educability, which is an important part of his school competency. School competency is the aggregate of all those abilities which the child brings with him to school and through the employment of which he attains, stepwise, the proficiency standards of the grades. Many children have deficient educability or, in other words, deficient competency in school work. Some children have superficient educability, they are supercompetent. Those children, on the other hand, who are so deficient in educability, or school competency, that they are unable to do the work of one grade in two years or 1A discussion prepared for the Educational Congress held under the direction of the Department of Public Instruction of the State of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, November 17-22. more, or to complete the six years of the curriculum in eight years or more, constitute a special problem so far as the school system is concerned. They are below the level of competency assumed in the standards established by the school system. They are not educable children in the school sense of the word.
The remedy sometimes proposed for these children is individual training, but what is individual training? To how many children can a teacher give real individual instruction at one time? In my opinion, to not more than two or three. Individual training is, therefore, out of the question in public school work. The grouping or classification of children, in large or small groups, must be assumed as one of the prescribed conditions entering into the definition of educability.
Applying this definition to the group of very bright children, we arrive at a definition of the very bright child as one who has such a high measure of competency that he is able to learn more than the prescribed curriculum within the prescribed time under the prescribed conditions. Do such children exist and if they do exist would it be wise or practical to group them together, permitting them to advance more rapidly than the ordinary or standard child? The use of the term “bright” in the diagnosis of an individual child or the definition of a group of children implies the possession of two mental attributes, alertness and speed. The bright child displays a more than ordinary alertness in the vivacity of his responses and the liveliness of his initiative. He will be quick to move, to observe, to think and to learn. At the opposite pole is the dull and slow child. The bright child is dominantly the child who is very much alive, and a fair measure of his liveliness is given by the relative speed of his thinking, doing, reacting and moving.
I take it, however, that in our discussion of this afternoon we mean by the term “very bright” children to imply the possession of other abilities than alertness and speed. A very competent child will always have, and an alert and speedy child will usually have, another important ability which I call intelligence, the ability to solve what for each individual child is a new problem. An alert, quick and intelligent child uses his congenital and acquired abilities to achieve successful results without effort. The dull, slow and stupid child gets on only as a result of such training and by dint of much drilling.
If a very bright and intelligent child is to be really educated, the education must be one that requires him to make an effort at his own level of competency. What will educate a dull, stupid and slow child will not educate a bright and intelligent child. The most competent children pass on from grade to grade without having to exert themselves. Some, indeed, use their intelligence to avoid getting an education, to outwit the teacher, to beat the game. Somewhere in the upper grades or in the high school it becomes, at last, impossible for them to get on any longer by their wits alone, and it is revealed to them, and sometimes to their teachers, that they have managed to pass on from grade to grade, without having acquired an adequate training in fundamentals.
This brings me to another important component of a child’s competency, i. e., his ability to be trained, his trainability, which, in general terms, is his ability to acquire efficiency. A child begins to talk at the age of eighteen months, but his initial efficiency in talking is approximately zero. From year to year he increases in efficiency until, at the age of six, he enters school with a relative proficiency in language, which is partly the result of a congenital ability and partly the result of practice and training. A high level of competency in language or in some other ability does not assure the child a high degree of efficiency. Endowed with a good voice and an ear for music a child may, on his own initiative, acquire enough efficiency in singing to sing fairly well without instruction. The smaller his measure of vocal and musical competency, the more training will he require to attain an acceptable standard of proficiency. If he would make a great success in life as a professional singer he must have the congenital ability to begin with and must then train it to a high degree of efficiency. More than ordinary competency in a specific ability is commonly called a talent, and the child endowed with one or more such unusual abilities is designated as talented, capable, or gifted. Some children are so alert, quick, intelligent and talented, and they acquire efficiency in the direction of their particular abilities so easily that they will enter school with a proficiency, even in school subjects, which children who are dull, slow, unintelligent and ungifted cannot attain after a year or more of hard work. The moral of the old fable of the hare and the tortoise should not persuade the educational administrators of this country to stake all of the public money on the success of the tortoises. If a child is to learn to read, write and cipher, he must bring with him to school some measure of competency to do and learn these elementary school operations, the school must then give him an adequate measure of efficiency. The ordinary standards of efficiency training in these subjects, at least as they are realized in school practice, are so low that very intelligent and talented children, especially in the early years, can meet the required standards of proficiency by their wits alone. When they reach that point in the educational system, where they can no longer produce a satisfactory result without working, some begin to work for the first time; others who still refuse to work are eliminated from the school system. I contend that it is not only the dull, unintelligent and incapable children, that is to say the relatively incompetent, who are eliminated year by year from the sixth grade level on, but many highly competent children, whose competency is not adequately exercised and trained in the lower grades. These leave the school system without having acquired any respect for educational or cultural ideals. They remain ignorant, but intelligent, critics of our educational theory and practice.
This must continue just so long as children of superior competency, ordinary competency, and inferior competency, are educated together in one and the same group. The competency of a child is an aggregate of many component abilities; alertness, speed, specific talent, and, perhaps the most important, intelligence and efficiency. The analytical diagnosis of children compels us to recognize that one child has great intelligence and but little efficiency; another, a little intelligence but much efficiency; a third, great intelligence and great efficiency, and yet another may have neither intelligence nor efficiency.
The life of the child at school, at home and on the street, and all his subsequent adult life is a continuous performance. In general the object of each particular performance is to achieve the highest possible measure of success. Some will succeed because they have the intelligence, which is creative imagination, invention, originality and initiative; others will succeed only by attention to detail, by industry, persistence and acquired skill.
The proficiency standard of a grade cannot possibly be set above the competency level of the ordinary group of children in the grade, but it should not be set below this level. In practice, day in and day out, the proficiency standard really operates at the level of the inferior group, because the teacher and the school system are judged adversely by the number of those who fail to meet the prescribed standard. For example, in rating Philadelphia school children, I do not accept the fact that a child is in a particular grade, say the third grade, as conclusive evidence that he is doing third grade work. Indeed, I often find children in the third grade, who are unable to do first grade work and, amazing as it may seem to you, I find, every now and then, children in the high school who are not able to make good in composition and arithmetic with the efficiency prescribed for even a sixth grade pupil. I come now to another mental ability, one which is the focal center of our professional interest from the first grade up through the high school, the college and the professional school. This is intellect, which I define as knowledge put to use. The imparting of information is justly enough considered to be the chief function of the educational system. “Knowledge is power,” and the educational system is distributing this power among the infant portion of the population. But knowledge is not power, until it is put to some use.
Within the educational system, the use to which acquired knowledge is commonly put is to pass an examination. Elementary school children and college students, as well, are highly trained, i. e., they are made efficient in absorbing the well-digested information imparted to them by their teachers, in retaining this information and in reproducing it on demand. An amount of information, measured in terms of its simple reproducibility, does not measure intellect or culture, and gives the pupil a very small modicum of the knowledge which is power. Does he use this information to solve problems? Can he acquire new knowledge for himself? Is he able to observe, describe, define, generalize and reason? Can he give oral or written expression to what he has observed and thought about? The true measure of an intellectual level is the ability to use acquired knowledge as an organic instrument of expression. The very bright child must be not only alert, quick, talented and intelligent, but these component parts of his competency must operate efficiently at a high intellectual level. Are college graduates more intelligent than those who have not been to college? No?because we fail to exercise their intelligence at a high intellectual level. We strive mainly to raise their intellectual level. Often we succeed only in adding inappreciably to their stock of reproducible information. We are now ready to define the characteristics of the very bright child. He will have superior alertness, quickness and intelligence, he will have attained a fairly high intellectual level or at least be capable of reaching a high level, and he must be able to acquire a high degree of efficiency in order that his intelligence may operate at the highest possible intellectual level with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of effort. How many such children are there? I don’t know, any more than I know how many feeble-minded children there are. The line separating one group from another will be drawn with reference to many different and always changing conditions. A child may be feeble-minded in one environment but not in another. Children are diagnosed as feeble-minded today who would not have been called feeble-minded fifty years ago. Feeblemindedness in the white race is not feeble-mindedness for the colored race. To determine the number of mentally deficient children who should be separately grouped and taught in special classes, it is necessary to know how many children six years of age are incompetent to meet the standard requirements of the first grade. I can only hazard a guess; and so I say that such children are probably not more than twenty per cent, or one-fifth, of all the children arriving at school age each year. In practice there may be more than twenty per cent, there may be less. In the same way, I should expect that not more than twenty per cent, or one-fifth, of all the children will be found to be very bright. The number may be considerably less. Of the remaining sixty per cent, which I call the ordinary children, one-third, or twenty per cent, of the whole number are median or mediocre; twenty per cent are bright, and twenty per cent of them are dull, slow and not very intelligent. In other words, I offer a preliminary classification of children into five equal groups: the very bright, the bright, the mediocre, the inferior or dull, and the very inferior or deficient, some of whom are so deficient in competency as to come within the social category of the feeble-minded. To find the very bright children, therefore, we must look for the most alert, the speediest, and the most capable of acquiring knowledge and using it with efficiency to solve original problems presented by the school curriculum and by the social, political and vocational requirements of community life. The more competent children will rely on their alertness, their quickness and their intelligence to solve school problems, but dull, slow and stupid children will rely on then memory. The proficiency standards of all the grades overweight memory. I do not advocate changing those standards. Perhaps the ordinary child needs most to have his memory trained but the very bright child needs more than this; he needs to have his intelligence exercised, and his memory trained, not in the mere reproduction of what he has learned, but in putting his acquired knowledge to use. His knowledge must become an organic part of his competency, and be employed, like his congenital abilities, as instruments through which he achieves success. I ask, therefore, that we should begin to train the very bright child. We have never tried to train bright children. It is only by accident and not by foresight or intent that a very bright child ever gets the training he needs. The discovery of a group of very bright children will be made as soon as intelligence tests are employed. The prescription of an educational treatment must take into consideration more than their special competency. The rate of progress of a child from grade, to grade, and through the high school, is determined not only by his competency and his acquired efficiency; it is conditioned by another important factor, the rate of growth, the rate of physical and mental maturation. A child who has not reached puberty is probably not yet fit for the high school curriculum, no matter how intelligent, alert, intellectual and efficient he may be. You can teach the very bright children, to read before they are five years of age but, except in very rare instances, this would be unwise. Before the age of six, many very bright children haven’t yet ripened into the ability to use phonics, so as to synthetize the sounds of new words. The discrimination of form is displayed by a child before he can discriminate color. He must talk fairly well before he is ready to read and write well. He can state the differences before he is able to give the resemblance of objects. He is ready to learn to read and write before he is ready to learn to cipher. The very bright children, therefore, must not be hurried through the school curriculum, because the stepwise advance of the school curriculum has, perhaps unconsciously, recognized this stepwise flowering of a child’s competency. The very bright children can learn ten things while some of the group of ordinary children are learning one. The training of very bright children should extend the range of their knowledge, power, skill, alertness and efficiency. The time alloted to the school is not sufficient to develop all the abilities of an ordinary child. We must concentrate on those abilities necessary to acquire and to use the three Rs, certainly during the first six years. If we spread our aim over the entire field of the ordinary child’s capabilities, we run the risk of failing to achieve the dominant aim of the elementary school system, which is to raise the human being above the level of illiteracy. But the problem of the very bright child is a different one. He scarcely needs to be taught to read, to write and to cipher, any more than he needs to be taught to walk and talk. If we have trouble teaching him the three Rs, it is because we are not teaching him well, or we are trying to teach him before he is ready to learn. The three Rs are an insignificant element in his education. The important element is the awakening of his congenital abilities; the exercise of those abilities; the extending of his range of interests, the general object being to lay the foundations so securely, that, as he passes from grade to grade up the ladder of maturation, he will be prepared to take in at each step an increasingly wider view. The abilities we should chiefly train are alertness, speed, intelligence, efficiency and those intellectual operations known as observation, description, comparison, discrimination, analysis, generalization and definition.
The only remaining question is whether it is possible for the common schools to give the group of very bright children what they need. I can tell you what they ought to get, it is for the school administrators to determine whether it can be provided for them. I advise, for the present, nothing more than tentative and sporadic attempts, as neither the school administration, nor the supervisors, nor the teachers, nor the public, are ready for an experiment on a large scale. First, give the supervisor who would like to make the experiment the liberty to make it under conditions that promise success. Then let him wait until he has found the right kind of teacher. All our teachers have been educated from their sixth year on in the old system. Even if they are intelligent enough to train very intelligent children, only a few of them will be able to escape the mental trammels of their own training. The teacher of this group of children must be very efficient as well as very intelligent, alert and well informed. These qualities are not often combined in one and the same person or system. The Montessori system, for example, is a very intelligent but an extremely inefficient system of education.
The time is very nearly ripe for successful experiments in educating the very competent. It should begin with children of from four to seven years of age, and the first tryout can be made by providing a clinic teacher to supplement either the ordinary kindergartener or the first grade teacher. The clinic teacher will undertake at first, only to find out what the children are really like, to measure and rate their competency. I contend that it is possible to determine with great precision before a child is six years of age, his individual competency to do the work of the first grade under prescribed conditions. If our kindergartens were organized to do this work, I would say that no child should be permitted to enter upon first grade work until after his school competency had been ascertained. Under present conditions I believe that the barrier had best be placed at the end of the first grade. Let us treat the kindergarten and the first school year as an opportunity to determine the relative competency of the children, and permit no child to enter upon second grade work who has not been able to acquire first grade proficiency. In some school systems, the barrier may be placed at the end of the first half of the first school year. The work of the first half year would be psychological exploration. It would give us a survey of the abilities each child brings to school with him under his own hat, and conclude with a grouping of the children into four different classes or groups, i. e.:
1. The group of ordinary children who may be expected to comprise about sixty per cent of all the children. 2. The group of very bright or very competent children who would certainly not run much more than twenty per cent. 3. The group of inferior or relatively incompetent children, also about twenty per cent.
4. A group of children so mentally deficient that they ought to be cared for in special institutions for the feeble-minded and not in the public schools.
On my scale of distribution, eighty per cent of all children are assumed to be competent at six years of age to enter upon the work of the first grade. If a child has first grade competency at the age of six, he can easily acquire first grade proficiency at the age of seven. Until he has first grade proficiency, he should not be permitted to enter a second grade of ordinary children. The second grade teacher has a right to know the kind of material which she is asked to develop in one year into competent third grade material. If our school administrators should ever discover how much the children of these four groups differ in educational competency, they would cease at once trying to enforce the same prescribed curriculum for all children. At our model school last summer, at the University of Pennsylvania, children whom our Psychological Clinic had diagnosed as feebleminded, were found in grades as high as the fourth grade, and the “model” teachers were supposed to teach these children as though they were ordinary children. And they were ordinary children within the definition given in the practice of the Philadelphia school system. They are to be found in the ordinary grades, although if they should apply for admission to the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-minded Children some of them would be rejected on the ground that they are not only feeble-minded but also noneducable, for this school is able to differentiate its educable children from the merely trainable or merely custodial, and does not undertake the impossible task of educating uneducable children.
A farmer does not try to cultivate weeds and grain in the same field; he even provides a different cultivation for his corn and potatoes. Let us be very optimistic and confidently await the day when education will be as scientifically and intelligently directed as agriculture.
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