Most high-IQ children do not win Fields Medals or become billionaire tech entrepreneurs. Even the most banal achievements often elude intellectually precocious children when they become adults. But among those who do make profound intellectual contributions to the world, several decades of research suggest that their potential can be discerned in childhood. The odds that any one gifted child will achieve eminence may be small, but a wise gambler searching for the next great scholar, physician, or titan of industry would bet on the precocious over the average child.
Rather than investing in high-IQ children, however, American society has moved in the opposite direction. An educational establishment seduced by egalitarian zeal, and an anti-intellectual American culture more generally, has turned the very idea of investing in our most intelligent kids into a sort of heresy, an uncouth departure from a conventional wisdom that has hardened since the 1930s.
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