Education: How to Be Famous

Peace and calm is no way to raise a child to fame and fortune. A home should rock with passion, roll with turbulence, all of it caused by a violently opinionated father who in his own time is a failure. His awed and admiring son will then spend a creative life avenging father.

So suggests Manhattan Psychologist Victor Goertzel, president of the National Association for Gifted Children. By studying the lives of 350 well-known people, Goertzel, 46, is trying to discover what kind of families breed the species. From the first 77 cases—he is methodically working through the alphabet—Psychologist Goertzel reports, in The Gifted Child Quarterly, that:

¶ “Children who are to become eminent do not like schools or schoolteachers.” Many famed men found their own homes more stimulating, preferred to skip school and read books omnivorously. Today’s “regimented schools” would not consider them college material.

¶”Creativity does not result from being reared in a warm, cohesive, supportive home.” although such homes do tend to produce good lawyers, humanitarians and politicians. But “ten of eleven famous novelists came from fragmented, stormy homes. Humorists come from tragic homes. Future poets and military leaders are often sickly, mother-dominated boys.”

¶ Parents of famous people were often hot partisans of unpopular causes. They were revolutionaries, civic reformers, Zionists, free-soilers, agnostics, abolitionists, objectors to infant damnation. Goertzel. riding his thesis hard, concludes that “the children frequently became eminent by adopting a parental point of view,-by fulfilling in action a parental daydream.”‘

All of this turmoil may have more to do with fostering creativity than does a high IQ, says Psychologist Goertzel. He also argues that “it is not true that traumatic experiences in childhood invariably lead to emotional disturbances and failure.” (Only one of his first 77 cases, Cross Founder Clara Barton, was ever confined to a mental hospital.) His subjects loved their mixed-up homes, mainly rebelled against a mixed-up society.

Sea & Hookey. Suffragette Susan B. Anthony’s father was a Quaker, an abolitionist and a temperance man who naturally took to the cause of women’s rights. The hard knocks he suffered for his views swung Susan behind him and united them both in battling the world. Her first battle: boarding school, which she hated. Joseph Conrad’s aristocratic Polish father was exiled to a remote part of Russia for revolutionary agitation against the Czar, made a meager living translating literature. A hungry reader from the age of five, the lonely boy was schooled largely by helping his father. Orphaned at eleven, he was sent to school, but soon escaped to sea, to England and to literature.

Sam Clemens’ father was a restless frontiersman, always dreaming of wealth and never finding it. The boy loathed school in Hannibal, Mo. As he later let Huck Finn put it: “At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired, I played hookey, and the hiding I got next day done me good and cheered me up.” Clemens himself fled school by the time he was 14.

Dunce’s Revenge. Nobody fits Goertzel’s findings better than Winston Church ill, who despised his tutor-governess, was sent off at seven to St. James’s School, where at nine he had a physical breakdown from trying to buck the system. Churchill was Harrow’s bottom scholar (and spent years mastering English while others went on to Greek and Latin). He twice failed Sandhurst’s entrance exams, barely passed on his third try.

Churchill typifies the son fulfilling “a parental daydream.” When Lord Randolph Churchill’s political career collapsed, 13-year-old Winston vowed: “My father was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I mean to be the same one day.” The lad burned to help his father “in every fight on every march.” Said Winston at his father’s death in 1895: “The dunce of the family will take revenge on the whole pack of curs and traitors.”