If not already mentioned, it’s worth keeing in mind that there’s smarts and there’s smarts. Being gifted at math or music doesn’t mean giften in other ways. There’s some reason to believe that each generation of kids is “smarter” than the previous, the “Flynn Effect.” (Search this website for discussions of it.)
I was reading a book called Neurons to Neighborhoods (National Academy Press) and I got the feeling that kids that learn multiple languages when young might have a leg up. The brain overproduces neurons at various stages of childhood and then trims them back based on environment/experience/learning of the child. So, some kids might just hit the right environment at the right time and get an extra bounce from it. Very oversimplified, but then again I’m not gifted…or am i? :dubious:
From what I remember of what was written about her at the time, it was pretty obvious she had no childhood to speak of. The rest of what I’d want to say would be Pit territory …
I just wanted to say that this is a good point. At the high school where I teach we have probably 15 juniors (mostly 15 at the start of their junior year) who are in AP AB calc, AP Lang and Composition, AP US history, and then pre-AP physics ( widely considered harder than the AP Bio that the top kids take sophmore year, and pass the exam for). We have another 8 juniors who have the same schedule except it is BC calc, and one of them is taking AP Euro this year, too.
I know our kids in 4 or more AP classes are working at a level far above that of a community college and comperable to what a good state school expects from students. I know because I talk to our kids who go off to community colleges and state schools and private schools. I know because my husband teaches at a good state school, and the expectations the school has for his class is lower than the expectations in mine. THese kid could do college work–they just prefer to do it in high school.
Every year we graduate at least a couple kids who have passed 8 or 9 AP exams: Usually the two AP English exams, Physics, Calc, Bio, Art History, Spanish, and Euro and American History. And we aren’t a special school–we are part of an enourmous urban district with all the problems that implies: thousands of schools produce thousands of kids of this caliber every year. They aren’t that rare.
Any kid that can do that could have handled the course load (though perhaps not the other social stuff) at your average state school at least a couple years before they actually graduated, and many I suspect could have handled that course load 3 or 4 years ahead of the normal schedule.
This also doesn’t even touch the issue of your good private schools: the top 10-20% of your high quality private schools blow even our best of the best out the water. Those kids aren’t staying in high school because they can’t handle the work in college–they are staying because they are getting a fabulous education and don’t see any reason to change.
And they come in all sexes, races, creeds, and colors.
I don’t know. I don’t think taking AP exams is the same thing as what the OP is asking about. Assume you have someone who starts college at 16 instead of 18 because they started kindergarten a year early, who takes a bunch of AP exams, who goes to school in summer and takes 20+ hours in spring/fall and who graduates at 18 or 19. That person isn’t really the same as a 13 year old who can handle graduate math, they are just a bit more ambitious than the average college student and maybe a little smarter.
personally I don’t see why child geniouses are so great. Once they graduate they are just another highly educated person. Do any/many of them make anymore contributions to the sciences that their peers who started doctorates at 23 or 30 instead? If you have two people going for a Ph.D. in something like physics, one is 13 and one is 23 then that is neat and all, but in 24 years it’ll just be two people with Doctorates in physics and 20 years of work experience, and one will be 37 and the other will be 47. Will anyone be able to tell the difference by then? Maybe all the kid did was mature faster. The only child prodigy I think really stands out is Gregory R. Smith and that is because he does charity work.
William James Sidis, who is considered to be the smarted man who ever lived supposedly discovered black holes. But that was his only real accomplishment in life as far as adding to the worlds knowledgebase.
The OP was asking specifically about 14 or 15 year old kids who start college. I was pointing out that every year at an average public high school we graduate 1 or 2 kids who could have done state-college level work at 14 or 15 and who opted instead to go the intensive high-school education route. I was making the point that the number of kids who do start college at 14 or 15 (the age range mentioned in the OP) is dwarfed by the number of kids who could.
I don’t think that beginning college at 14 or 15 is any BFD, particularly in the US education system. A lot of kids would be capable without being exceptionally or profoundly gifted.
Radical acceleration isn’t a bad thing which automatically dooms a kid to a life of weirdness. A lot of these kids don’t fit in school and don’t fit in at uni either but at least while they’re at college or uni, they’re learning. Not choosing to do radical acceleration doesn’t mean you’re a good parent who is better than some parent who does choose that route. The parents I know who have gone that route have made the decision based on what their kid needs, the ones who have chosen differently have done the same thing. The 9yo I knew who was doing uni maths was much happier doing that than sitting doing maths he had already thoroughly mastered at 8. Winner’s theory of a rage to master domains is true for a lot of these kids.
Gross et al have just released a study on radical acceleration
Well, this might overstate the case. Admittedly my public high school district was fabulous compared with most across the country, but I wouldn’t say it was fabulous a priori. It was more that I knew from the few courses I was taking as a “non-degree-seeking” student at a nearby university I wouldn’t have done at all well socially – worse even than I was already doing in the public school system.
Bingo. Most straight-A high-schoolers could handle at least the first two years of college. Core classes like English 101-102 and the like are not far removed from high-school at most schools. It’s really kind of ridiculous.
I think it’s worth pointing out this quote from the abstract:
underlining for emphasis mine. That is to say, this report doesn’t directly speak to the OP since some large number of the cases studied aren’t truly entering college early.
From my readings, the answer is: many. I don’t have the time to give you cites, but many of the 20th century’s great violinists/pianists/composers evidenced tremendous gifts at a young age.
Not all prodigies become titans, but most titans started as prodigies.
There are(maybe were, I haven’t seen one of them around this year) two biology majors at school who were 14 and 13. Both had their parents with them at all times when they were on campus. This year, the 14 year old, now obviously 15, is apparently allowed to go to class without his mom. I didn’t have a class with him, but a friend of mine did. They had to spend the night at the ecology station, so he and his dad went. With his mom gone, they managed to talk to Alex. She said he was nice, very shy, but definitely seemed to want to talk to everyone as soon as he got away from his parents. Apparently he’s got five majors in the hope that that will keep him in school until he can graduate with people his own age.
-Lil
One of my boyfriends when I was in high school was starting his first year of his PhD at Berkeley in math. He had graduated from UPenn in 3 years, I think. He dropped out of grad school after a year, but went on to become one of the Wizards of the Coast.
I think that whether you are accelerated in your education has nothing to do with how happy you turn out later in life. The important thing is how other people react to your acceleration and whether the acceleration happens naturally or you are unmercifully pushed by a parent. The fact is that other people can treat you like dirt regardless whether or not you are a prodigy in your education if they just don’t like smart people.
I went to a thrid-rate high school where nearly all the students came from working-class families and not very many went to college. The real way to status for a boy at my high school was to play football. Despite this, I knew early on that I wanted to go to a first-rate college and maybe get a Ph.D. I didn’t play football. This may have something to do with the fact that I’m 4’11’. I was not a prodigy. I entered college at 18. I did go to a first-rate college and eventually got two masters.
Had I gone to a high school in an upper-middle-class suburb where nearly all the students’ parents were college-educated and where it was expected that many students would go on to advanced degrees, I would have been nothing exceptional. Perhpas the best student in the class, but perhaps not. In my high school though, I was rather unpopular. It was made clear that no one had any business having ambition. Regardless of how smart you were, the absolute best you could hope fof was to go to a second-rate state university and come back to teach high school. I was considered a snob and a traitor for wanting more.
There are at least two reasons that some prodigies don’t do well in later life and some don’t have happy lives. One is that prodigies have the same problems as other people and sometimes their lives don’t turn out well. The other is that they are often treated badly by people who feel threaten by anybody smarter and more ambitious than them.
I wonder how someone who goes to college at 14 develops socially. When do they get with a girl for the first time, or have their first beer? Where do they make friends? Do they get involved in sports or non-academic activities or are such activitiesto be avoided so nothing distracts the delicate genius? Do they miss having these things or do they view the world as full of imbeciles?
I think people who are super-smart can have problems regardless of what year they go to college. It seems that a lot of them tend to grow up coddled or sheltered. I work with a lot of graduates from MIT and other top schools. Often they seem somehow less mature than normal folks. In terms of experience with drugs, alchohol or sexual relationships, they seem a little behind. Their “bar” of what they consider “zany” and “outlandish” behavior is fairly low so they seem silly or naive. For example, I don’t consider it “cool” or “hip” that we have beer in the office on Fridays. I think it would be cool and hip for our company to turn a profit and I’ll buy my own beer. I went through that naive geeky period myself. It was called “freshman year”.
This might be veering off into IMHO territory, but I’ll weigh in anyway. I went away to college at 13, although that was a special program for younguns like myself and I didn’t really mix with anyone of typical college age. By age 15 I had transferred to a different place and my experience became the same as any other college student, living in the dorm, etc. I wasn’t interested in drinking, so the beer question isn’t relevant. Socially, I made some great friends (of both sexes). I dated someone for the first time my second year there, when I was 16. That didn’t go so well, but I imagine it doesn’t go too well for a lot of 16-year-olds in high school, either. :dubious:
In contrast to me, my first roommate at that second college was actually 14 and in her first year. She had very overprotective parents, and as soon as they dropped her off she was into all kinds of irresponsible stuff, especially drinking. She got carried home a few times from fraternity parties, until the fraternities learned how young she was and how much trouble they could get into if they let her drink. So different people have different reactions to that kind of freedom from your parents at such a young age. No surprise there.
I wasn’t actually that high of an achiever in school. In some ways, going to college so early just made it easier for me to do a bit of slacking off and spend more time on socializing but not fall behind. I graduated college at age 18, spent an extra year taking a couple of college courses I’d need in grad school, went to grad school and got my PhD when I was 27. So as time went on, the age gap between my peers and me was definitely narrowing. At this point, a few years into my career, it’s becoming even less noticeable.
So the moral of this story is: YMMV. And, of course, ANYbody can have problems, social or intellectual, when they try something new. Age is not a determining factor, at least IME.
William James Sidis was admitted to Harvard in 1909 when he was 11 years old. He was probably the first child prodigy to get extensive news coverage, which turned nasty later in his life. The New York Times called him the “April Fool” and mocked him for working at a regular job instead of becoming a university professor. His defenders to this day say that he was judged unfairly, and that he was condemned in the court of public opinion for publishing his research into American Indian history, for putting forward the idea that white American culture owes a lot to the American Indians. An idea which has now gained more acceptance, but was unheard-of radical in the 1930s. Sidis’s defenders argue that he is not a case of a failed child prodigy, because he wasn’t a failure by his own lights: he accomplished what he wanted to do.
Is it widespread for colleges to allow you to reduce the number of credits you need to graduate by scoring high on the AP exams? I earned 2 AP class credits, but what that did was allow me to check off 2 non-major related classes in order to graduate; I still had to earn the same number of total credits to graduate, but I was able to choose 2 more electives than usual.
And I took 3 years of one language in high school then 3 years of another in college. Practice in speaking both through all that time has likely helped me retain more of each, more so than if I aced short term memory test based language classes in an accererated manner. I should think science has its own equivalents in lab procedure/experience etc. Thus I have to think you can speed through credits quickly without necessarily ending up “better educated.”