Evening star., 1937-11-21
F0RG0TTEn PR0D|G|ES
What "chnd wonders when they up?
by ALBERT EDWARD WIGGAM

Y A IHERE is Winifred Stoner? A re-
n cent press dispatch stated that
wv she had inherited a fortune in
England and that her relatives
were looking for her. BY the time this appears
she will probably have been located and the
fortune duly delivered.
Younger readers may ask not, Where is
Winifred Stoner?" but who is Winifred
Stoner?" Older readers, however. will recall
her as the first of the crop of child prodigies
to be exploited In 1914, Mother" Stoner,
wife of an Evansville, Indiana, physician.
brought Winifred to New York and exhibited
her as manufactured genius - the product
of her system of natural education"
Winifred could then speak several Ian
guages - moderately we'll - had read an un-
usual number of books and had written
several poems of considerable merit. She was
widely publicized by S. S. Mcclure in the old
"McClures Magazine" and, with his back
ing, the "Stoner System" was started in a
number of cities with teachers trained in the
natural method" According to Mr.. Mcclure
and Mother Stoner geniuses were soon going
to be growing on trees.
These hopes have not been realized, partly
because geniuses cannot be created by educa-
ton, and partly because extremely few so
called child prodigies" are geniuses in the true
sense or have any hope of ever becoming so.
The fact that it has been hard to locate
Winifred Stoner, who promised to be as easy
to find at maturity as Babe Ruth or Charlie
Mccarthy or the Washington monument,
brings up the question as to what becomes of
child prodigies The public is convinced that
nearly all of them peter out, become lop-sided.
frail. neurotic, 'temperamental," or even
land in the insane asylum. As talked with
Prof Lewis Terman at Stanford University
about the thousand gifted" children he has
been studying for the last fifteen years, he
exclaimed, isn't it pity that few who
have either broken down nervously or else
have never amounted to much should cause
people to believe that nearly all brilliant chill
dren follow this course of development"
These few cases have caused many parents to
be disturbed if they have an unusually bright
child, and to become positively frightened if
they learn it has high l O., as the intelligence
rating is now called.
Are these fears justified? Three large
investigations and many minor ones have
shown they are not. The first of these in
vestigations was the study by Prof. Terman.
His thousand gifted" children were selected
in 1922 and ranged in age from to IA.
All had los of 14O or higher-the point
Tentatively selected as indicating possible
future genius Six years later. when many of
them had reached mental maturity It
mind is practically mature at l6 or 18 8-two
hundred and ninety-two of these children
we're retested, and on the average their los
had changed only few points. -Four or five
had developed i'll health or emotional diff
ficulty - a remarkably small number out OF
2s2 children. All tests showed they were
emotionally more stable and were somewhat
bigger and stronger than average children.
Several had won honors in high school and
college; one had started on the road to fame
in music and is now an internationally known
composer. Four others had become finished
musicians and composers; several had shown
great promise as writer's.
The second investigation was made by
Professor Terman and DR.. Catharine Cox
Miles, now of Yale University. Doctor Miles
approached the problem from the other end of
life, looking back from the famous adult
genius to the child. She found that an enor-