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READING PASSAGE 9
The Nature of Genius
There has always been ari interest in geniuses and prodigies. The word ‘genius’, from the Latin gens (= family)
and the term ‘genius’, meaning ‘begetter’, comes from the early Roman cult of a divinity as the head of the
family. In its earliest form, genius was concerned with the ability of the head of the family, the paterfamilias,
to perpetuate himself. Gradually, genius came to represent a person’s characteristics and thence an individual’s
highest attributes derived from his ‘genius’ or guiding spirit. Today, people still look
to stars or genes,
astrology or genetics, in the hope of finding the source of exceptional abilities or personal characteristics.
The concept of genius and of gifts has become part of our folk culture, and attitudes are
ambivalent towards them. We envy the gifted and mistrust them. In the mythology of giftedness, it is popularly
believed that if people are talented in one area, they must be defective in another, that intellectuals are
impractical, that prodigies burn too brightly too soon and burn out, that gifted
people are eccentric, that
they are physical weaklings, that there’s a thin line between genius and madness, that genius runs in families,
that the gifted are so clever they don’t need special help, that giftedness is the same as having a high IQ, that
some races are more intelligent or musical or mathematical than others, that genius goes unrecognised and
unrewarded, that adversity makes men wise or that people with gifts have a responsibility to use them.
Language has been enriched with such terms as ‘highbrow’, ‘egghead’, ‘blue-stocking’, ‘wiseacre’, ‘know-all’,
‘boffin’ and, for many, ‘intellectual’ is a term of denigration.
The nineteenth century saw considerable interest in the nature of genius, and produced not a few studies of
famous prodigies.
Perhaps for us today, two of the most significant aspects of most of these studies of genius
are the frequency with which early encouragement and teaching by parents and tutors had beneficial effects on
the intellectual, artistic or musical development of the children but caused great difficulties of adjustment later
in their lives, and the frequency with which abilities went unrecognised by teachers and schools. However, the
difficulty with the evidence produced by these studies, fascinating as they are in collecting together
anecdotes and apparent similarities and exceptions, is that they are not what we would today call norm-
referenced. In other words, when,
for instance, information is collated about early illnesses, methods of
upbringing, schooling, etc., we must also take into account information from other historical sources about
how common or exceptional these were at the time. For instance, infant mortality was high and life
expectancy much shorter than today, home tutoring was common in the families of the nobility and wealthy,
bullying and corporal punishment were common at the best independent schools and,
for the most part, the
cases studied were members of the privileged classes. It was only with the growth of paediatrics
and psychology in the twentieth century that studies could be carried out on a more objective, if still not
always very scientific, basis.
Geniuses, however they are defined, are but the peaks which stand out through the mist of history and
are visible to the particular observer from his or her particular vantage point. Change the observers and the
vantage points, clear away some of the mist, and a different lot of peaks appear. Genius is a term we apply to
those whom we recognise for their outstanding achievements and who stand near the end of the continuum of
human abilities which reaches back through the mundane and mediocre to the incapable. There is still much
truth in Dr Samuel Johnson’s observation, The true genius Is
a mind of large general powers, accidentally
determined to some particular direction’. We may disagree with the ‘general’, for we doubt if all musicians of
genius could have become scientists of genius or vice versa, but there is no doubting the accidental
determination which nurtured or triggered their gifts into those channels into which they have poured their
powers so successfully. Along the continuum of abilities are hundreds of thousands of gifted men and women,
boys and girls.
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What we appreciate, enjoy or marvel at in thè works of genius or the achievements of prodigies are the
manifestations of skills or abilities which
are similar to, but so much superior to, our own. But that their minds
are not different from our own is demonstrated by the fact that the hard-won discoveries of scientists like
Kepler or Einstein become the commonplace knowledge of schoolchildren and the once outrageous shapes and
colours of an artist like Paul Klee so soon appear on the fabrics we wear. This does not minimise the
supremacy of their achievements, which outstrip our own as the sub-four-minute milers outstrip our jogging.
To think of geniuses and the gifted as having uniquely different brains is only reasonable If we accept that each
human brain is uniquely different. The purpose of instruction is to make US even more different from one
another, and in the process of being educated we can learn from the achievements
of those more gifted
than ourselves. But before we try to emulate geniuses or encourage our children to do so we should note that
some of the things we learn from them may prove unpalatable. We may envy their achievements and fame, but
we should also recognise the price they may have paid in terms of perseverance, single-mindedness,
dedication, restrictions on their personal lives, the demands upon their energies and time, and how often they
had to display great courage to preserve their integrity or to make their way to the top.
Genius and giftedness are relative descriptive terms of no real substance. We may, at best,
give them some
precision by defining them and placing them in a context but, whatever we do, we should never delude
ourselves into believing that gifted children or geniuses are different from the rest of humanity, save in the
degree to which they have developed the performance of their abilities.
