Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Making genius children: You can only do it in a critical window period





The entire Polgar family: Susan and Judit (standing), Sofia, mother Klara, 

father László and a gleeful baby Oliver


Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian Jewish psychologist wanted to conduct an experiment. First he have to find a spouse. Laszlo wanted to prove that it is possible to bring up his children into genius. He found a woman, Klara who would do his bidding. They got married and produced three daughter, Susan, Sophia and Judith. The daughters of Polgar were taken out of mainstream school by their parents to be home-schooled.

The kids grew up and stunned the whole world by becoming each and everyone themselves a grandmaster in chess. In particular, Judit Polgár is the strongest woman player in history. She achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, the youngest person to do so until then. She has been ranked as high as eighth (in 2005). She is the only woman to have won a game from a current world number one player, and has defeated nine current or former world champions in either rapid or classical chess: Anatoli Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Boris Spassky, Vasily Smyslov, Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand, Ruslan Ponomariov, Alexander Khalifman, and Rustam Kasimdzhanov.

Later, Laszlo wrote a book, titled "Bring Up Genius", advocating that geniuses are made, not born.

Early interventions improve IQ by as much as 20 points

A child can be make stupid by parents even if the child is congenitally clever or can be make clever by parents providing good positive intervention. If a child is abused day in day out, eventually he will be a moron. Also poverty is likely to impact a child's IQ negatively.

A study (1999) by Capron and Duyme of French children adopted between the ages of four and six examined the influence of socioeconomic status (SES). The children's IQs initially averaged 77, putting them near retardation. Most were abused or neglected as infants, then shunted from one foster home or institution to the next. Nine years later after adoption, when they were on average 14 years old, they retook the IQ tests, and all of them did better. The amount they improved was directly related to the adopting family's socioeconomic status. "Children adopted by farmers and laborers had average IQ scores of 85.5; those placed with middle-class families had average scores of 92. The average IQ scores of youngsters placed in well-to-do homes climbed more than 20 points, to 98."

The median score of IQ is around 100. Roughly 2% is 130. A IQ of around 80 is consider quite dumb. An exceptionally gifted person has IQ of around 150. Capron and Duyme results shown that IQ of a person is volatile, and can be improved through hard work and positive childhood intervention. By putting dumb kids into a rich home, their IQ hike from moronic level, to close to 100, which is the score of an average person.

A society can have a lot of potential genius but the trick is early intervention

More and more researches are showing indications that early intervention is the key to high IQ. By early intervention, a moron can have normal IQ. A normal person could have a smart guy IQ. A gifted person could evolved into genius. Early this year, John Protzko of New York University published a research giving yet another empirical that early intervention works.

My earlier post shows the Heckman Curve. It roughly suggests similar messages, though not in qualitative terms like IQ. Heckman Curve suggest that program that target earliest years of education reaped the most benefit. When someone ages, the return of education program is much lower.

While it is certain that some program can improve the IQ of adult, but such program never make someone a genius.



Early intervention could be among one of the fact certain tribes have higher IQ

The Chinese are known to give intervention programs to their kids, in the form of tuition or programs like piano lessons. In older days, tuition can start quite late, probably when parents realize the child is failing. Today, tuition especially for the rich kid can start as early as 4 years old. This is definitely one of the main reasons Chinese perform well in schools. Nevertheless, such programs could be quite late in the child's life to form a genius.

Today, the world is getting competitive. The intervention program of 0-3 years old child is still quite underlooked and those parents who are able to educate the child at this period will unlock huge potential of the child, that will give the child a superlative edge in comparison with peers. The parents may be able to make a genius.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Veritas, could you provide more articles or links to sort of early intervention methods or techniques

Anonymous said...

THE CHINESE SHOULD DO MORE INTERVENTION TO THEIR CHILDREN.
SINCE THEY ARE KIASU THEY SHOULD SENT THEIR KIDS 1YR OLD INSTEAD OF 4YRS TO KINDERGARTEN.

Anonymous said...

THE CHINESE SHOULD DO MORE INTERVENTION TO THEIR CHILDREN.
SINCE THEY ARE KIASU THEY SHOULD SENT THEIR KIDS 1YR OLD INSTEAD OF 4YRS TO KINDERGARTEN.SO SINGAPORE WILL HAVE MORE GENIUS.

Veritas said...

The verifiable anecdotes that describe interventions is The Education of Karl Witte. This book is selling like hot cake in China. The English version is on the link.

http://ran-raz-knigi.narod.ru/The_Education_of_Karl_Witte.pdf

Anonymous said...

Hi Veritas, thanks for the link.
To anon, 12/9/13@2.25pm, please take a read, it may improve your next generation.

Slycat said...

Obviously you did not have any early intervention since, considering all the posts on your blog that you've made, you're quite a moron. Did it hurt when you were "beaten day in day out"?

Anonymous said...

Don't take this wrong, but I'm not actually against your blog. I'm against this whole mindset of IQ, and all. First of all, playing chess is not a matter of "intelligence" (see, amongst many others: http://www.nature.com/news/2002/021212/full/news021209-10.html).

The whole point about using keywords like talent, and innate capability is that these all betray a "fixed" mindset. What we should aim for is a "growth" mindset. The research into this also uses "entity" for "fixed", and "incremental" for "growth".

Veritas said...

You may use any term. My main point is early intervention bring a lot of cognitive benefits.