CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

PROBLEMS OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN THE CASE OF HIGHLY INTELLIGENT PUPILS

An address before the National Committee on Coördination of Secondary Education at a symposium on "The Education of Pupils of High Intelligence," Cleveland, February 27, 1939 [1]

I shall not dwell here upon the present knowledge of gifted children as organisms. Our findings in follow-up studies on tested children in New York City confirm in all particulars Professor Terman's researches on the Pacific coast. Since these several studies have been carried on in complete independence, one in the East, the other in the West, for nearly twenty years, we may certainly feel justified in the conclusion that we are arriving at truth about the mental and physical traits and development of highly intelligent persons, coming as we do to the same results.

My remarks here will deal, rather, with certain problems of the _education_ of the highly intelligent. I may say at the outset that my direct contacts with the education of gifted pupils have all been on the level of the elementary school. I consider that the problems are most urgent on this level, because it is in the primary and elementary school that the very intelligent child most especially needs a supplement to the standard curriculum. The program of progress through the elementary grades is based on what pupils at, or only very slightly above, the average can master at given ages, so that the extremely intelligent child has little or nothing to do there. His interest is not engaged, and his power is not challenged. The situation of such children has been well exemplified in a recent biography [2] which sets forth the sense of futility from which many of them suffer at school in the early years.

When the child reaches senior high school, however, the case is somewhat different. The college preparatory course of the secondary school was originated with and for pupils of college caliber. It is therefore based on what very intelligent adolescents, and they only, can learn. Hence it offers to the pupil at and above 130 IQ (S-B) tasks of sufficient interest and difficulty to engage his powers of learning.

Laying aside, for purposes of the moment, argument as to whether the content of the college preparatory course is what it should be from all angles, we maintain that it is sufficiently abstract, complex, and difficult to operate as an intellectual stimulus for quite highly intelligent adolescents. I shall return to this point later, raising it here merely to explain why it has seemed to me especially important to work in the elementary school.

One cannot work for long in the elementary school, however, without becoming involved in research which has to do with the secondary school. There are many problems of coördination that require for their adequate study the joint efforts of both elementary and secondary school. We are currently trying to find answers to these problems at Public School 500, Manhattan, for we shall begin sending pupils from there to the senior high schools in June, 1939.

THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

For some years, beginning about 1918, experimentation has been sporadically undertaken in New York City on the initiative of individual principals to find out what should be done in the elementary school for highly intelligent children. It was not, however, until January, 1936, that the Board of Education itself took official action in cognizance of the presence of these pupils in the school system. On January 28, 1936, Public School 500, Manhattan (Speyer School, [3] was founded by formal action of the Board of Education and Teachers College, jointly, for the study of intellectual deviates, other than the feeble-minded, in the elementary school.

Two classes for rapid learners were included in the setup of this school, to accommodate twenty-five pupils each. These classes have now (1939) been in progress for three years. Their chief purpose has been to find experimentally and to establish a curriculum that would provide a genuine education for children of mental calibers above 130 IQ (S-B); an education that would extend their minds and interest them in the interests of society during the years of the elementary school.

Pupils were selected for this experiment on the basis of three criteria: (1) they must test at or above 130 IQ (S-B); (2) they must be at least 7 years 0 months old, and at most 9 years 6 months old; (3) they must be representative as a group of the various ethnic stocks composing the population of New York City. This constitutes what we consider a perfectly democratic selection. Nothing "counts" toward selection except the tested quality of the pupil himself.

The organization is that of an 8B elementary school, designed to run for five years as an experiment. Promotion to the ninth grade of the senior high schools at the age of 13 years was planned for our pupils. The school also includes seven classes for slow learners (IQ 75-90), the pupils of which mingle freely with those of the rapid learner classes except for purposes of classroom instruction.

The teachers were selected from a long list of applicants for the posts among licensed elementary-school teachers of New York City. Criteria for selection rested on personality, degree of education, and desire to undertake experimental work.

Enrichment of the curriculum has been going forward for three years. Pupils at and above 130 [IQ] (S-B) need, on the average, about one half of their time in the elementary school for mastering the standard curriculum set up for "all the children." "Mastering" here means not "passing" with a mark of 65 per cent, but genuine _mastery_ with marks of 90 per cent and above.

In the half day thus left to spare, an enrichment curriculum has been pursued, which has elsewhere been described in some detail. [4] The chief features of this enrichment curriculum are a series of units, one each term in each class, on "The Evolution of Common Things" and the French language and literature.

TRANSITION FROM ELEMENTARY TO SECONDARY SCHOOL

The time comes when pupils thus selected and educated are to pass to the ninth grade of the senior high school. At this point questions arise which call urgently for discussion as a joint responsibility of both elementary and secondary schools. Some of these questions are as follows:

1. Why is 13 years to be chosen as the optimum age for the transition?

2. Why is junior high school omitted from the picture?

3. What ceremony, if any, should mark the transition to senior high school?

4. What items of cumulative record should accompany the pupil as he or she enters high school?

5. What differences are there in the demands of high school, as compared with the elementary school, which would affect the minimum IQ at which enrichment is needed in the high school? Is enrichment needed in the high school at 130 IQ (S-B)?

6. The point at which enrichment begins to be needed having been determined experimentally, how should the secondary school organize to provide a genuine education for pupils at and above that level?

7. Assuming an enrichment program for pupils above 150 IQ (S-B) desirable or imperatively necessary in high schools, what matters shall be agreed upon to enter into the curriculum?

8. Shall we guide all of our highly intelligent elementary-school pupils into the college preparatory courses? Or shall some of them be so guided that they will end high school without the "credits" for college?

9. What can and should public schools do for those few pupils who test at or above 170 IQ (S-B), for whom no experimental work so far done is of much real effect, either in elementary or secondary school?

CONSIDERATION OF THE QUESTIONS ARISING

Not all the foregoing questions proposed can be fully discussed here. Whatever is said, however, is an outgrowth of our own professional observations, extending over the past seventeen years. In particular these observations result from the current obligation at Public School 500, Manhattan (Speyer School), to promote to senior high school our first group of children now reaching the thirteenth birthday.

It is obvious that we have to determine upon _an age_ for promotion to the senior high school. This must take into consideration "the whole child." We cannot isolate the intellect for this purpose. "Body, mind, and soul" must pass as a unit to secondary school.

The brightest of our pupils were fully ready for the scholastic work of the ninth grade when they were 8 years old; several others, when they were 10 years old. Ability to "pass examinations" set for 8B pupils cannot, therefore, reasonably become our criterion for promoting these children, unless we wish to assume responsibility for placing prepubescent, 8-, 9- and 10-year-old children in a scholastic milieu that is determined by the physical size and social maturity of adolescents.

After much discussion, we fixed upon 13 years as the age for transition to senior high school. We came to this largely as a result of our pooled professional experience, but not wholly on that basis. We gave considerable weight to the follow-up study of pupils identified in 1922, and kept together for three years in special classes at Public School 165, Manhattan. [5] There were 56 of these children whom we promoted to the ninth grade at an average age of 11 years; and the high-school careers of all of them were followed through sixteen different high schools. [6] In the course of this follow-up, the question was repeatedly asked, "What would be the best age to enter the ninth grade?"

Sixty per cent of these pupils gave 13 years as the "best age" to enter high school, and twenty-six per cent gave 14 years or older. Only one child gave an age younger than 12 years as optimum for entering high school. This group, as a whole, would have preferred to enter the ninth grade at an age older than that at which they entered, and gave cogent reasons for the preference during their high-school careers.

These ideas persisted through the college careers, especially among the boys, many of whom felt they were misplaced in college at 15 years of age. Entering high school near the thirteenth birthday, a child saves time, and yet is not made subject to the tensions which may result from trying to meet social and physical requirements for which he is too immature.

Junior high school is omitted from the picture as ours was a five-year plan. Such a plan of curriculum enrichment as ours fits best into the 8B setup, for such a program cannot be supervised if the pupils are scattered and the situation made subject to the transition from 6B to junior high school. In the metropolitan situation it is not feasible to take the pupils for special classes until they are at least 7 years old. The infrequency of their occurrence makes it necessary to assemble them from several districts, and they are not mature enough to come from a distance when they are 6 years of age. Parents cannot assume the burden of accompanying them twice a day. Our pupils were 8 years old, on the median, when they entered our rapid learner classes.

We have found it feasible to organize classes for 8-year-olds, give them a five-year program of special studies, and have them fully ready for senior high school at 13 years of age. This plan has worked out well, whereas, if we had had to consider a transition to the junior high school in the midst of our work, difficulties would have arisen, and it is not clear how our program could have been carried out at all. However, a field for _experimentation_ lies here for those who would be predisposed to favor the junior-high-school plan of school organization.

We decided that no ceremony of graduation should mark the promotion to senior high school. Our pupils will make the transition not in a body, but a few at a time at the end of each term. Some informal social event may take place, but no ceremony of graduation as such.

The question, "What items of cumulative record should accompany each child from the elementary school?" is one requiring much study. Here we are working quite experimentally. The public schools of Altoona, Elkins Park, and Fort Wayne, Pennsylvania, are reported to have formulated a cumulative record card for rapid learners, which we hope later to consult. The records of mental tests, the record of scholastic-achievement tests, and a statement of teachers' ratings on a variety of character traits should no doubt be included with the health record and attendance record in the elementary school.

Ideally, the secondary school should receive these pupils already tested mentally, with cumulative records; but, since in the existing state of affairs this is not possible, because such tests have not been generally made, the high schools are wondering what methods to use in selecting the highly intelligent as they arrive, in the ordinary course of events, for admission.

We must agree that we have, in fact, no method at present generally available of distributing the top percentile of the adolescent population. The Army Alpha, which strictly speaking pertains to adults, is no doubt the most nearly appropriate instrument we have for distributing the top one per cent of adolescents. No other group test has sufficient "top" for this purpose, and no individual test has a "ceiling" high enough to prevent the best from "going through." Two forms of Army Alpha combined will give as good an approximation as is at present available to a correct distribution of adolescents at and above 130 IQ (S-B).

There exist tests of scholastic aptitude which pertain to adolescents of college caliber, but these are not generally available, being limited to the organizations which make specific use of them.

From observations of the progress of highly intelligent children tested at an early age, I offer the hypothesis that pupils of 130 to 150 IQ (S-B) have quite enough to do in the truly efficient pursuit of the college preparatory curriculum of the senior high schools, and do not need any enrichment of this curriculum as far as challenge to ability is concerned. What these pupils need is merely freedom from the presence of great masses of classmates who are mentally unadapted to the college preparatory course, and the opportunity to work unhampered, in segregated groups, such as are now being formed in many secondary schools under the concept of _the honor school_.

Pupils above 150 IQ (S-B) are, however, probably in definite need of an enrichment of even the college preparatory course as it exists currently in senior high schools. If experimental observation should prove this hypothesis to be true, how should the secondary school set about it to provide for the genuine education of such pupils? Should the huge high schools of a great city, like New York, organize an enrichment curriculum within the honor schools for these extreme deviates? Should honor schools have faculties proper to them only? Assuming an enrichment program for pupils above 150 IQ (S-B) to be found desirable or necessary in secondary school, what matters shall find place in such a curriculum?

The answers to these questions cannot be stated from the swivel chair or the arm chair. Years of realistic hard and intelligent work will have to be done, by way of experiment with various groups of adolescents. As regards the question pertaining to enrichment of curriculum, I dare offer the suggestion that there are "common things" the evolution of which would be more properly worked out at the adolescent level than at the level of childhood by highly intelligent pupils. Thus at Public School 500, Manhattan (Speyer School), we often find ourselves wishing that we might have our pupils at adolescence in order to take up with them the evolution of law and order, of trade and money, of warfare, of punishment, and many other things concerning which no systematic instruction is ever given outside of professional schools.

One may suggest that in the elementary school the enrichment curriculum might proceed by covering the evolution of "common things" which are concrete, as we have been doing, leaving for the secondary school those "common things" which are relatively abstract and involve especially concepts of social-economic consequence.

It is to be considered, also, that each of these pupils, at and above 150 IQ (S-B), would have the capacity to master a manual trade, in addition to mastering a profession, if time were allowed during adolescence. At 13 years of age, the hand then being developed, such pupils might be trained for skilled trades, in their spare time, as an enrichment of curriculum. In a changing world it is perhaps a good thing for those who are capable of _both_ profession and skilled manual craft to have _both_ at their service as adults, and to be capable of serving society and themselves in more than one specialized vocation, as was and is actually the case with many able Americans, reared and educated under pioneering conditions of the nineteenth century and earlier.

To this point we have been speaking of enrichments accompanying and supplementing the college preparatory course for pupils testing above 150 IQ (S-B). But shall we guide _all_ our highly intelligent pupils into college preparatory courses? Or shall some of them be positively guided so that they will end high school without the "credits" for college? Shall all whose circumstances tend to force them into vocational high schools be allowed to drift in that direction? Here is a question of fundamental importance for society, which at this moment we hardly know enough to raise, much less answer. Only one in every hundred tests at or above 130 IQ (S-B). What does society most _need_ from this little handful of persons? These can perform socially desired functions which none of the other ninety and nine can possibly perform. They can be educated in ways which are forever out of the reach of all who test below them. What should we, as educators, the publicly appointed guardians of their intellectual lives, do with these children for their own and society's best interests?

There is no more serious question than this in all education. How shall a democracy educate the most educable? At present these children are to a great extent lost in the vast enterprises of mass education, and are left to handle their special problems as they may, by themselves, while the energies of teachers are bent upon the main business of dealing with the ninety-nine per cent who test below 130 IQ (S-B). Common sense would tell us that a child who tests as far above the average as a feeble-minded child tests below cannot escape having special problems under conditions of mass education. We cannot go into this matter in detail here. These problems have been set forth in another place. [7] It is for us to consider them carefully, for educators are the sole group appointed by society to guard the interests of children. We are their official guardians, adding our guidance to that of their natural guardians, parents, who are often helpless either to recognize these children's abilities or to develop them.

WHAT ABOUT GENIUS?

We come finally to what may be the most important point of all--the point to where we inquire into the responsibility of the public schools for children who are as far above those of 130 IQ (S-B) as the latter are above 100 IQ (S-B). I refer to those very rarely occurring pupils who test at or above 170 IQ (S-B). These children are important for civilization in inverse ratio to their infrequency of occurrence. They are the ones who can not only _conserve_ thought in its abstract reaches, but who can _originate_ new thoughts, new inventions, new patterns, and who can solve problems.

When, about twenty years ago, Terman [8] began to attempt classifications of high deviates, on the basis of IQ, he called 140 IQ (S-B) "genius or near genius." The intervening years have proved that this idea must be revised. Seniors in many of our first-rate colleges test at a median of 140 IQ (S-B) or even higher, and about a quarter of _all_ college graduates test at or above this level.

That point in the distribution of IQ where mental products suggestive of genius, as defined by lexicographers, begin to appear, seems to be as far above 140 IQ as 140 IQ is above average. Somewhere between 170 and 180 IQ (S-B) we begin to see merging in early adulthood that "highly unusual power of invention or origination," that "original creative power, frequently working through the imagination," which is ordinarily called "genius." [9]

This element in our juvenile population, so significant and so rarely found, passes unrecognized at present through the public schools. We have not even commenced to evolve an education suitable for a child who at 9 or 10 years of age is able to think on a college level. The idea that such children exist at all is even laughed at to scorn by teachers and principals who have a quarter of a century of "experience" behind them. These children have no way of making themselves known. The _mental tests_ make them known. They become known only to those educators who "believe in" mental tests.

The most interesting problem in education is to discover how these children, testing above 170 IQ (S-B) can and should be educated; to devise ways and means whereby these far deviates may get the full use of their abilities in school and society, especially when they have no money. The concept of democracy on which the United States was founded is one of equality of opportunity. The intention of our educational policy is that every child should have a chance to develop as his natural abilities may entitle him to do, all artificial distinctions being eliminated. Now at last psychological science has provided an effective instrument for achieving this democracy in education, namely the mental test, by means of which a child may be recognized for his own ability, regardless of age, sex, race, creed, or economic condition.

How shall we as educators utilize this instrument of genuine democracy? How shall we proceed under conditions in which the founding fathers are now mistaken by many citizens to have proclaimed and promised biological equality!

Perhaps we should take another leaf from the book of the French Republic, where the delusion of biological equality has always been successfully avoided; where the State continually reviews its attempt to secure equality of opportunity by explicit efforts to find and foster the natural élite, and to know where the gifted are located in the French population. [11]

We may also consider the Belgian policies, with regard to subsidy of the gifted, [12] "Ce principe fondamental: Que chaque enfant, quelle que soit la situation de fortune des parents, soit mis en état d'acquérir par l'instruction tout le développement intellectuel et professionnel dont il est capable."

All the questions here raised call for definite answers _at the present time_. Such questions could not be effectively raised prior to the twentieth century, because psychologists had not previously advanced to a point of supplying a scientific method of determining intelligence in childhood. It is the most significant contribution of psychology to education, in this century--and perhaps in all centuries--that we are now enabled to know the mental caliber of a human being in his early years.

More and more it becomes clear that human welfare on the whole is much more a matter of the activities of _deviates_ than it is a matter of what the middle mass of persons does. Those educators who make a joke of the genius and regard the dullard as a mere figment of the imagination of psychologists, or who solve the educational problems which these children present by the simple device of "not believing in" them, fiddle while Rome burns. It is the deviate who takes the initiative and plays the primary part in social determination. How shall we, then, educate him in a democracy?

[1] Reprinted from _The Journal of Educational Sociology_ (October, 1939), pages 90-102.

[2] Bridgman, Amy S. _My Valuable Time: The Story of Paul Bridgman Boyd_. (109 pages.) Stephen Daye Press, Brattleboro, Vermont; 1938.

[3] Hollingworth, Leta S. "The Founding of Public School 500: Speyer School," _Teachers College Record_, Vol. 37 (November, 1936), pages 119-128.

[4] Hollingworth, Leta S. "An Enrichment Curriculum for Rapid Learners at Public School 500: Speyer School," _Teachers College Record_, Vol. 39 (January, 1938), Pages 296-306. See also Chapter 21 of this book.

[5] Lamson, E. E. "A Study of Young Gifted Children in Senior High School." _Contributions to Education_ No. 424 (117 pages). Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York; 1930.

[6] Lamson, E. E. "High School Achievement of Fifty-Six Gifted Children." _Journal of Genetic Psychology_, Vol. 47 (1935), pages 233-238.

[7] Hollingworth, Leta S. "The Child of Very Superior Intelligence as a Special Problem in Social Adjustment." _Proceedings_ of the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene, Vol. II, pages 47-69. The International Committee for Mental Hygiene, Inc., New York; 1932.

[8] Terman, Lewis M. _The Measurement of Intelligence_ (362 pages). Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; 1916. Also, Terman, Lewis M. _Genetic Studies of Genius_, Vol. I (663 pages). Stanford University Press, Stanford University, California; 1925.

[9] Webster's New International Dictionary, 1935.

[10] Butler, Nicholas Murray. "Is Thomas Jefferson the Forgotten Man?" Address delivered at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, September 1, 1935. Published at 405 West 117th Street, New York.

[11] Bouglé, C. _Enquêtes sur le Baccalauréat_. (120 pages.) Librairie Hachette, Paris; 1935.

[12] Bauwens, Léon. _Fonds des mieux doués_. (Cinquième édition, 77 pages.) Librairie Albert Dewit, Bruxelles; 1927.