Education: Bright Bunny

In all the U. S. there is room for only one or two persons with an intelligence quotient above 200. Odds against such phenomena psychologists estimate at 100,000,000-to-1. Last week professional jealousy brought out the full story of a Brooklyn, N. Y. youngster with the staggering I. Q. of 230.

For months Mrs. Julie Neumann, director of Brooklyn’s Ethical Culture School, had been bursting with a great secret. Last fortnight when she read of “K,” the prodigy with an I. Q. of 196 discovered by the College of the City of New York (TIME, Dec. 3), she could contain herself no longer, revealed that one of her pupils, “X,” had been graded 230. But just as jealous as Mrs. Neumann was Mrs. Winifred Travis, chairman of the Parents’ Association of Public School 217. X, she declared, had been at the Ethical Culture School only three months, was really a product of P. S. 217. At that point, X’s parents, Mr. & Mrs. George H. Greenwood, stepped forward to state that they were “not interested in giving credit to any institution.” X was Arthur (“Bunny”) Greenwood, aged 7 years, 7 months. His intelligence quotient had been arrived at privately by an officer of the Board of Education’s Child Guidance Bureau. Although based on the standard Stanford-Binet tests, it was not official.

Whether or not Bunny Greenwood was the smartest boy in the world, there was no doubt that he was a topnotch prodigy. He did not begin to talk until he was 20 months old but when he did, according to his mentors, he rattled off complete, grammatical sentences. By his second birthday, with help from his letter blocks, none from his parents, he had taught himself to read. Bunny’s most startling exploit occurred shortly after that when he sat down at a piano, worked out a system of musical notation, using a different number for each note. Today he is a chubby, serious lad with a mental age of 16, a conversational level above that of the ordinary adult. Only normal in his physical development, he suffers from a desire to revise the rules of every game he plays, sometimes bursts out crying if he loses. He likes best to perform feats of daring. Pet dislikes are fighting and arguing, both of which he thinks are “needless and quite pointless, since nothing is ever settled by them.” In the use of his hands Bunny is backward. Prescribed for him and other bright pupils at the Ethical Culture School are carpentry, clay modeling, painting, drawing, paper cutting.

“Bunny is a sweet, normal child and we are desperately anxious to keep him that way,” said his mother last week. Like her husband, who teaches mathematics in a Brooklyn high school, Mrs. Greenwood is Jewish, well-educated. No prodigy is Bunny’s brother David, 3.