the creative child

"One member of the faculty who looked forward to seeing the last of Winston [Churchill] was H.O.D. Davidson, who, as his housemaster, was responsible for discipline and therefore his natural enemy. . . Winston, Davidson had conceded, was the ablest boy in his form. He was, in fact, remarkable. His grasp of history was outstanding. Yet he was considered a hopeless pupil. It occurred to no one that the fault might lie, not in the boy, but in the school. Samuel Butler defined genius as "a supreme capacity for getting its professors into trouble of all kinds," and it is ironic that geniuses are likeliest to be misunderstood in classrooms. Studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Montana have found that teachers smile on children with high IQs and frown upon those with creative minds. Intelligent but uncreative students accept conformity, never rebel, and complete their assignments with dispatch and to perfection. The creative child, on the other hand, is manipulative, imaginative, and intuitive. He is likely to harass the teacher. He is regarded as wild, naughty, silly, undependable, lacking in seriousness or even promise. His behavior is distracting; he doesn't seem to be trying; he gives unique answers to banal questions, touching off laughter among the other children. The Goetzels concluded that a Stanford study of genius, under which teachers selected bright students, would have excluded Churchill, Einstein, Picasso, and Mark Twain."

William Manchester

The Last Lion: Winston Churchill: Volume I