Bottling Lightning

Jay D. Homnick on gifted children and suicide:

I find it urgent that we all commit, as I committed that day twenty-seven years ago when that boy cast off the moorings of sanity, to keep our children as close as possible to the studies and activities that apply to their age level. The human mind is a force of roaring strength and whimpering fragility all at once. It needs to be stretched and massaged and developed and... yes, babied.

Growing up is hard enough to do for people of ordinary skills. In high school, the lookers are trying to mark the studiers as losers, while the athletes try to eclipse the artists. The tensions and conflicts are a veritable obstacle course for the best-adjusted child; tampering with this balance by pushing people intellectually ahead of their age and socially behind their classmates is a recipe for disaster.

Those familiar with my own life are aware that I completed high school at age fourteen. The next four years for me were a time of zany fun seasoned with profound misery. College was too daunting to try before sixteen, so two years were spent in the public parks of Brooklyn; thank God for basketball, handball, and stickball. Then I started college at sixteen, and although I did well scholastically, the dislocation of age was an ever-present oppression.

I think it's a mistake.

These kids are isolated no matter how you slice it. They are as out of touch with kids their age as one can be, and I for one could think of no greater torment than being stifled.

The answer to me is not to place kids ahead of their class per se, but to provide them with advanced instruction such that they can continue to develop their intellect to its potential as they are inclined to do.

The truly tragic solution would be to stuff them back in a box with the "normal" kids, or to medicate them until they act more like other children their age.