Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

chamber. But humanity is steadily tending away from the possibility of that method, and there is no probability that it will ever be practiced.
    (Goddard 1913)
    Twenty years after the publication of Goddard’s work, the
Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring
was passed in Nazi Germany; 2 400,000 people were subsequently sterilized against their will and a further 275,000 killed under Hitler’s personal ‘T4’ programme in which, in Hitler’s own words:
    Patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death.
    In 1916, a psychologist (and another eugenicist) from Stanford University named Lewis Terman, adapted Binet’s original process and concepts, adding further elements to the test and creating what became known as the Stanford–Binet test, essentially the ‘IQ Test’ we have today. Building on the success of this test, in 1921, he set about a remarkable longitudinal study entitled
Genetic Studies of Genius
, a project that is still running. 3 In it he identified 1,470 children who had high IQs – and therefore, obviously, great potential – who he then tracked, tested and analysed for the rest of his life, starting a project that will continue until the last one either pulls out or dies. These people became known as his ‘Termites’. What did Terman learn? According to Malcolm Gladwell in his enlightening, if a little repetitive book,
Outliers,
Terman wrote in the fourth volume of the study:
    We have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.
    (Gladwell 2008)
    Terman’s Termites went on to have good lives, but not extraordinary ones. There were a few who ended up as judges or politicians and they earned good salaries on the whole but, as Gladwell points out, ‘not
that
good’. But then, the group were predominantly white, middle and upper-class Californians born between 1900 and 1925, whose parents were often Terman’s university staff colleagues, none of whom came from ‘private, parochial (religious) or Chinese schools’ as one later report pointed out (Holahan and Sears 1995). With that sort of background, it would be hard for them not to do quite well.
    What is of huge ironic interest to the anti-eugenicists is the fact that none of the children whose ‘genius’ was predicted by the IQ testing went on to win a Nobel Prize. However,
not one but two
children who Terman’s IQ filtering process eliminated did. Louis Alvarez 4 won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968, but is best known as the man behind the ‘impact theory’ of dinosaur extinction. William Shockley, 5 whose work paved the way for Silicon Valley (not to mention whose report to the US War Department paved the way for the use of the atom bombs onNagasaki and Hiroshima), was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956. In a double irony, Shockley himself was a particularly controversial eugenicist in later life with views on sterilization, race and the heritability of intelligence that made him very unpopular in many quarters. He was also a high profile donor to the Repository for Germinal Choice – the ‘Nobel Prize sperm bank’. 6
    In 1974, a smaller-scale but similar study to Terman’s was begun on 70 children in the UK, trying to identify why certain children were labelled as gifted and others not. Although still ongoing, a 2006 report states that:
    a gifted childhood has not always delivered outstanding adult success. Better predictive factors were hard work, emotional support and a positive, open, personal outlook.
    (Freeman 2006)
    In other words, what we often take for ‘genius’, as Gladwell joyously points out, supported by the report above, is more often than not cleverness backed up by an awful lot of hard work. Yes, there is a certain amount of heredity involved in how intelligent you are, but nothing that good parenting and a good education (as opposed to a mediocre or damaging schooling) can’t influence significantly.
    Just how much hard work is needed has also been the subject of much research, and the findings come down to a remarkably precise and consistent number, one that seems to be true no matter what the field in which you aspire to excel – 10,000 hours. Research by Anders Ericsson 7 at Florida State University, quoted by Gladwell but pre-empted two years earlier by Daniel Levitin in his book
This Is Your Brain On Music
shows that:
    In study after study, of