"MARVELOUS BOYS"

Northwestern's child prodigies, who were selected in a blaze of glory and then carefully cloaked from vulgar inquiry, have come once more, and in a very fitting manner, to the attention of all. The senior of their number, now seventeen, has just been elected to Phi-Beta Kappa, with a truly prodigious grade average and amid appropriate eclat. Northwestern seems to feel that this vindicates the essential wisdom of her experiment, and even Dr. Flexner declares that he is reminded of his old dream of a prodigy high school in New York.

But that President Scott's results justify his innovation is not clear. In the first place, the prodigy for whom educators solemnly draw up plans and curricula is little more than an hypothesis. It is true that there are precocious children, in fairly large quantities, and mentally receptive children, and even creative children. But when these intangible superiorities, known only in their effects, are gauged by the Binet tests, the implications cannot be uniform in each case. Superintelligent children with normal balance are, according to Mr. M. V. O'Shea, natural leaders of their contemporaries and should be permitted to retain the invaluable common touch, early in play groups, later in divergent associations. Those who show unfavorable balance records must be directed to humanizing pursuits, and, above all, liberated from the chilly solitude of superiority.

President Scott, however, thinks otherwise. His prodigies, apparently selected without reference to emotional or psychic stability are collectively thrust into an artificial environment, minutely supervised by a committee, and submitted to a special brand of instruction. Revision of college courses to provide opportunity for work at varied levels would be a much saner procedure. That the Northwestern prodigies will be successful in their college work is as obvious as it is irrelevant. After four years, however, they will leave, socially unfitted, intellectually strained, and quite as far from the good life as they had been before. Possibly the professorial joy at a competent student is in the nature of a partial compensation; possibly the social Benents of a normal college life have been overestimated; but President Scott should be neither surprised nor shocked if his prodigies, a few years hence, are tempted to turn on him with holy anger and sweep his precious incubator to destruction.