Education: Golden Lads & Lasses

Citizens . . . you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold . . . others he has made of silver to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron. . . . If the son of a gold or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful toward the child because he has to descend in the scale . . . just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold and silver in them, are raised to honor. . . . For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed.

Twenty-three hundred years after Plato, educators still debated whether the golden sons of brass and iron parents have a good chance to be raised to honor. After a year and a half of research, an investigating committee last week decided that they did not. To a conference of educators at Columbia’s Teachers College, the University of Chicago’s Stephen M. Corey, head of the committee, reported: “The assumption seems to have been that ‘genius will out.’ The committee believes this faith unjustified.”

To give genius a better chance, Professor Corey’s committee recommended that a National Commission for the Identification of Talented Youth be set up. The Commission would stage a talent hunt through every high school in the land, using tests to find the top tenth of 1% in each group (about 2,000 in the U.S.). No tests now in use satisfy the committee: tests should measure not only academic aptitude, but scientific and artistic ability, and “talent for constructive social leadership,” said Dr. Corey.

Once the Commission had found the “top 2,000” U.S. youths, it would broadcast their names to colleges as well as to business and industrial groups which might want to subsidize their studies.

The Corey report met with praise, and with some apprehension. Professor Arthur T. Jersild of Teachers College liked the report’s “emphasis on . . . [the] many kinds of ability. . . . An I.Q. of 200 is useless if it is fettered by archaic habits of thought.” But he raised a point which had already bothered the committee, “the hazards to the individual of being singled out as an outstandingly able person,” and added a personal misgiving: “whether a roster of elite human beings . . . is wholesome and wise from a democratic point of view.”