That many of these kids, despite being outliers, have already been much documented suggests that we use mental prodigies the way Renaissance people used physical prodigies (the boy-wolf, the fish-woman): that is, to prove a moral point. Along the way, we encounter the big names in prodigy-land, among them Philippa Schuyler, the African-American child genius of the nineteen-thirties and forties (and also the subject of a New Yorker profile, by Joseph Mitchell), and Bobby Fischer, the chess-playing son of Jewish Communists, who ended up a crazed anti-Semite. The book takes us from William James Sidis and Norbert Wiener, Jewish prodigies at Harvard at the beginning of the twentieth century (Sidis was the subject of a profile by James Thurber, of all people, in these pages), to their seeming successors in Silicon Valley, the hero-nerds who have become as much an American typology as the enfants sauvages of France ever were. There seems nothing more melancholy than the fate of prodigies. Hulbert’s book is smart-as all her books have been, particularly the child-centric “ Raising America”-and often sad. Protestants in undersized clothing-which may be a giveaway that what’s at stake is ethical before it’s educational. There’s the same agonizing question of American achievement: What can we learn, in a society dedicated to high-achieving children, from children who seem “naturally” off the charts in their achievements? How can we make our children less anxious while still making sure that they achieve? Are prodigies a race apart, or are they merely more persistent than other kids? (As Hulbert cautions, the paradox of the self-made prodigy is that persistence itself is an inborn gift, as odd as any other.) The arguments seem to echo ancient religious ones-mysterious innate grace does battle with hard-won grit, Catholics vs. Yet her book shares some themes with the Europhile ones. In “ Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies” (Knopf), Ann Hulbert seems to be taking up the opposite end of the child-rearing stick rather than ordinary kids with ordinary parents, these are the outliers, right here in America. Until we get to that final destination, we’ll never be apart. The style of middle-class child rearing that the Germans and the French and the rest might help us escape from is really more handcuff than helicopter, with the parent and the child both, like the man and woman agents in a sixties spy movie, shackled to the same valise-in this case, the one that carries not the secret plans for a bomb but the college-admission papers.
The helicopter metaphor is an odd one, since helicopters can often only hover, helplessly, as in the Vietnam-era newsreels, as the action goes on below. “There are some rules, including a curfew: teens under sixteen must be out of the clubs and restaurants by ten p.m., those under eighteen must leave by midnight.” (Could these fine-print rules be effectively enforced anywhere except in Germany?) German parents don’t merely not hover they refuse to hover, on considered principle, and send the kids off to school and back, after having digested the odds of a child’s being snatched along the way and, sensibly enough, decided that it’s a safe bet they won’t be.Īnd here we arrive at the real ghost that haunts these books, the one that sends us to Paris or Berlin for help: the sense that American parents have gone radically wrong, making themselves and their kids miserable in the process, by hovering over them like helicopters instead of observing them from a watchtower, at a safe distance. “In addition to park areas designed for them, adolescents can go into almost all places in Berlin, including dance clubs and bars,” Zaske writes. Adolescents are not only indulged in their freewheeling impulses whole parks are specifically set aside for their explorations. Kids aren’t merely encouraged not to be dependent on toys there is a “toy-free” month when no one at the day-care center is allowed to play with them. Nowhere else, it seems, will you find such tightly controlled varieties of freedom, such militarized ordering of open-ended play, such centralized rules for creative anarchy. In her depiction, the new German style of child rearing remains, well, extremely German: here are the most highly organized forms of not being highly organized that have ever existed.
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