by Ann Hulbert
Unlike their prodigy predecessors, the adolescent boys lucky enough to get their hands on computers weren’t mere precocious achievers of adult-level prowess. They were poised to be pioneers. They knew the powers they were honing would influence everybody, not simply impress their elders. They also dared to presume they would set the pace and the path. And lonely though programming work could be, they soon realized that their geeky peers, not their teachers or parents, would be their most important allies. “I knew more than he did for the first day, but only for that first day,” said the math teacher who introduced Gates and his friends to the PDP hookup. After seventh grade, Joseph Bates, the other boy who went on to become a precocious Johns Hopkins student, took a summer noncredit college computer science course. A young math teacher at his school joined him. No one in the class could match Joe. Nerds in the eyes of cool kids and girls, these late social bloomers had parents and educators on edge. The boys mostly weren’t out protesting “the machine.” Machine-obsessed, they were inside, mysteriously programming. Where was this awkward yet arrogant male tribe—with its own underground life—headed?
By now everybody, young and old, takes the upstart-dropout-startup ethos for granted as a defining feature of the high-tech era. Your children know you can’t keep pace with the apps they swear by, and if you have a coder up at all hours behind his closed door, good luck telling him that homework is more important. “The state of mind demanded by a world that quests after ever more rapid technical change is alien to anyone over forty,” as Michael Lewis put it in Next: The Future Just Happened (2002). “The middle-aged technologist knows that somewhere out there some kid in his bedroom is dreaming up something that will make him obsolete.” We have glamorized the misfit aura, too. Apple’s “think different” ad campaign in the late 1990s made it a theme: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.” But three decades before young computer adepts got branded and Lewis wrote about underage Internet subversives, the future was still unfolding. Inspired by a do-it-yourself ethos and countercultural ideals, a “personal computer movement” was building momentum.
For the elders of this unusual tribe, clustered on either coast, the prewar refrain about wholesome adjustment for prodigies was beside the point. They were the opposite of the mature mentor type, and proud of it. “Like infants discovering the world” was how the mathematician Seymour Papert described the group gathered in MIT’s artificial intelligence lab in the 1960s. A decade or two (or three) older than the boys, he and his colleagues had been enthralled by their “all-night sessions around a PDP-1 computer.” Hanging out at Stanford’s AI lab in 1972, the journalist/futurist/Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand celebrated “the youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science.” It was “the most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests,” he wrote in his Rolling Stone portrait of the “fanatics with a potent new toy”—a toy that was “coming to the people.” Nearby at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), Alan Kay (a former Quiz Kid) was one of the “computer bums” determined to make that happen. The little Dynabook he aimed to build was to be “usable in the woods,” he said, by “children of all ages”—those avid, bold learners we start out being, before school-bound labors kill the joy.
Brand paid tribute to the utopian pedagogy on the opening page of the Whole Earth Catalog (subtitled Access to Tools): “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” Children would become bold programmers instead of being programmed as if they were “bundles of aptitudes and ineptitudes,…‘mathematical’ or ‘not mathematical’…‘intelligent’ or ‘dumb,’ ” Papert wrote later. For radical “Yearners” like him, impatient with blinkered “Schoolers,” the “informal learning of the unschooled toddler or the exceptional child” was the model for all. Brand distinguished between “hackers” and “planners,” and in the former lay the hybrid ideal: preschooler meets prodigy—driven by exuberant devotion not just to rules but to unruliness. “Remember this was the 70s,” Brand said in retrospect as he summed up the cognitive style of the computer pioneers: “fuck around with it, mess with it, try it sideways. That was what it was all about.”
Julian Stanley, the advocate of skipping high school, was a math guy from a different planet. The tall and gawky Georgian, nearly fifty when he joined the Hopkins faculty in 1967, arrived fresh from a fellowship at Stanford that had been “heaven”—but not the high-flying computer freak kind. An educational psychologist fascinated by psychometrics, he had chaired the College Board’s Committee of Examiners in Aptitude Testing; he had also served on the Educational Testing Service’s research committee. Stanley swore by the postwar technocratic meritocracy that sorted and labeled using measures of “schoolhouse giftedness” then stirring debate. In Papert’s terms, he was more schooler than yearner.
But even Stanley, a “ ‘drybones methodologist,’ virtually a fanatic about statistics” (his self-description), was primed for rejuvenation as he made the midcareer move to Hopkins. “Sick and tired” of the arid formulas, he was elated when, thanks to flesh-and-blood Jonathan and Joe, he stumbled on a new use for the SAT: give the math portion to middle schoolers, anoint the high scorers as precocious quants, and hurry the prodigies onward to Ph.D.’s. Stanley got busy fomenting what he later called a “quiet revolution” in education. His goal of accelerating a select few up a prestigious academic ladder was a stark contrast to the computer freaks’ countercultural vision of Everychild-as-freewheeling-programmer, with “plenty of time for screwing around,” as Alan Kay put it. In Brand’s terms, Stanley was a planner, not a hacker.
Yet the categories proved too tidy to fit Stanley. Nor did the dichotomies suit his first radical accelerants, who proceeded onward to computing breakthroughs after serving as inspirations for what became a centerpiece of superachiever culture: the Johns Hopkins talent search and the Center for Talented Youth (CTY) summer programs, better known by now as “nerd camp.” Jonathan and Joe may have started out looking more like the schooler and planner breed than their unchaperoned, and soon spectacularly successful, counterparts Jobs and Gates did. In fact, the pioneering computer prodigies on both coasts made the most of the meritocratic fast-track route and the oddball loner mystique.
At the same time, not getting carried away by either badge of distinction turned out to be a challenge for them all: a young upstart could be in too much of a hurry, too out of step with peers. Their successors also had to figure that out, among them Sergey Brin, a star CTY alumnus. So, in her own way, did a rare girl who ended up excelling in the boys’ high-tech club, becoming (among other things) a MacArthur fellow and a cofounder of Google X. In 1987, the year Brin enrolled in a CTY session at fifteen, a teenager named Yoko Matsuoka arrived in Florida to pursue sports prodigy training, her “inner geek” under wraps: she was as eager not to be a dork as she was to be a bold standout. By then, the drawbacks of insular elitism had dawned on Julian Stanley, too. Two decades later, Silicon Valley wasn’t yet dwelling on the downsides, but Jonathan was, having learned them the hard way.
· 2 ·
“It seemed to many persons then, including me, that this was a bold, perhaps rash, move,” Stanley said later of the culmination of the Saturday pastime he dreamed up for Joe Bates soon after meeting the shy eighth grader with dark-rimmed glasses in 1969. You might say natural reflexes also kicked in: mentoring, for Stanley, meant measuring the aptitude of the boy whom a Hopkins colleague had flagged as a star in her summer computer course. He gave Joe test after test every weekend for months. He was eager for more specific insights than Lewis Terman’s IQ assessment could supply, or than scores in the tippy-top percentiles of age-appropriate standardized tests could reveal. For Joe, who loved machines (his first word had been bus), the mechanica
l reasoning questions that cropped up were the most fun. For Stanley, giving College Board tests to a middle schooler delivered a special thrill. And when Joe scored a stunning 669 (out of 800) on the math SAT, Stanley felt sure he had found not just a rare talent but a rare tool for exposing it. The statistician sprang into action. Local high schools wouldn’t accelerate Joe. His 642 and 772 on the two math College Board achievements (he did better on the harder one) and a 752 on the physics test inspired Stanley to ask the Hopkins dean to take a gamble and admit him.
Joe, who described himself in retrospect as a “calm and compliant kid” from a supportive lower-middle-class Jewish family in Baltimore, wasn’t actually chafing. He had built circuits and learned programming for two glorious weeks the summer after sixth grade, thanks to a cousin at the University of Rochester computer lab. He had joined the eighth-grade math club at school on his return. He had lucked into being tutored (for free) by an idealistic young teacher who then enrolled in the noncredit computer course along with him. Now thirteen, Joe was taking college math classes at night. He didn’t lack for opportunities. By the same token, such a boy (a volunteer at the synagogue and a figure skater as well) was a good bet for Stanley’s experiment. Plus Joe, though short, could pass for a college student: he was already shaving. His father began driving him to campus every day in the fall of 1969.
JOSEPH BATES Credit 10
Joe’s first year at Hopkins was indeed going superbly when, perfectly timed to stoke Stanley’s excited sense of discovery, another thirteen-year-old boy came to his notice in 1970. “One swallow does not make a spring,” he had reminded himself as he tracked Joe’s progress, and Jonathan Edwards and his mother were clearly birds of a different, more ruffled feather. Evelyn Edwards, a reading teacher who had gotten wind of Joe’s early admission, was a “very, very aggressive” lobbyist for a son whose obvious “maladjustment” (Stanley’s words) also raised doubts. Jonathan, who had surged ahead in math outside of school, was miserably at odds with his classmates, a social outlier. But at thirteen, he scored even higher on the math SAT than Joe had, 716; he broke 700 on the math and physics achievement tests, too. Besides, stymied brilliance demanded attention more urgently than stable brilliance did. Stanley prevailed on Hopkins again. Jonathan, slight and still very much a boy, didn’t blend in on campus, but he shaped right up. Stanley touted Jonathan’s 3.75 grade-point average his first year and his own “conversion” to the fervent advocacy for off-the-charts children that had galvanized Lewis Terman before him.
“My life and career thereafter have never been the same,” Stanley wrote shortly before he died in 2005. An anomalous event—an obviously extremely bright middle-school student acing a college entrance exam, and then thriving in college courses—had been replicated. Emboldened to feel that “the scientific method, in so far as it is a method, is nothing more than doing one’s damnedest with one’s mind, no holds barred,” Stanley was not deterred by a sample of only two, both of whom had yet to graduate. He was excited by his SAT radar. It could, he was convinced, home in on rare math talent in an already select group of pre–high school students: those who clustered in the top several percentiles on the age-appropriate national standardized tests they took at school. Challenge them with a test like the SAT that had no “ceiling effects” for them, and otherwise hidden gifts would be revealed that could and should be speedily developed.
With a hacker’s improvisatory zeal, Stanley wrote what he later described as the “shortest and probably quickest” grant application—barely five double-spaced pages long—proposing to “do something, I hardly knew what, to find and help such prodigies.” He sent it to the newly established Spencer Foundation, which in 1971 was eager to disburse funds (and where he had a few friends on the staff). Stanley won a five-year grant of $266,100, with hardly a string attached. “As far as external controls, I didn’t have any,” he later marveled. “I could try anything I wanted to.”
He was on the fast track, a step ahead of the federal government, which weighed in on gifted education a year later with typical bureaucratic caution, the top-down planner way. The Marland Report of 1972 was studiously all-inclusive in issuing the first official definition of “children of high performance”—students “with demonstrated achievement and/or ability in any of the following areas, single or in combination: 1) general intellectual ability 2) specific academic aptitude 3) creative or productive thinking 4) leadership ability 5) visual and performing arts 6) psychomotor ability.” Congress appropriated a budget that was barely bigger than Stanley’s, and it was for research and for the development of teachers, as well as for the first Office of Talented and Gifted. That meant training for grown-ups, not for gifted children.
The imposing name Stanley gave his project, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), promised research, but of an entrepreneurial, grassroots variety. He set out quickly, with several colleagues, to organize a talent search for students whose SAT math scores before they turned thirteen were 500 or above, matching or exceeding the average college applicant’s. And that was just the start. “We decided we didn’t find these kids just to admire them,” as he put it, “but instead to help them.” Stanley took his cues from the revered pioneers in the gifted field (which had become “very weak” in his view, he privately noted). He was inspired by Leta Hollingworth’s educational efforts decades earlier on behalf of the supergifted group with IQs above 180, but he breezed by her concerns about possible social and emotional issues facing such children. Instead he invoked Terman’s data on well-balanced genius. Stanley welcomed “the assurance that we were not going to find that our high scorers were burned out by twenty” as he kept his eye out for yet more recruits with truly sky-high scores who might hurry through college early. “Perhaps, if given the same opportunity,” he reflected, “Gauss, Newton, and Einstein would have been even more precocious educationally.” What the value added might have been, he didn’t say.
Few talent searchers can resist dreams of spotting unusual, otherwise unheralded genius. In truth, though, Stanley’s quest—which got its start in March 1972 and drew some four hundred eligible young SAT-takers—was structured to appeal to those already quite well served by a test-based status quo. That was partly why it proved so popular so quickly, growing sevenfold and becoming national in scope over the next fifteen years. Stanley talked about unearthing innately “exceptional math reasoners.” But as he also acknowledged—and Joe and Jonathan demonstrated—the top performers had generally benefited from prior supplemental work outside of class to excel on college-entry tests so young. (Ten percent of the male participants who took the math SAT in his inaugural search scored 660 or above.) That in turn meant they were likely to have attentive parents, eager to enable extra math opportunities for their children—at any rate, for their sons. Several of Stanley’s younger female colleagues took note that girls, far fewer of whom participated in the initial talent searches and made the cut, seemed to get less math encouragement. (Title IX, prohibiting discrimination based on sex by any educational institution receiving federal funds, was signed into law only in the summer of 1972.) As his searches quickly expanded beyond Baltimore, Stanley wasn’t worrying about any lack of parental pushiness. “Fortunately,” he remarked, “there always seems to be lurking in the background some envious mother who knows her child can do at least that well.”
As for how to help his high scorers, Stanley and his colleagues were feeling their way in a pragmatic—yet also impatient—spirit. “Our intent is to supplement and complement school-based instruction,” he later emphasized, “not supplant, criticize or ‘invade’ it.” Above all, they wanted to find out how fast their mathematically precocious youths—and they, their promoters—could go. A month after the first talent search, twenty of “our ‘prodigies,’ ” as Stanley called them, were enrolled in his first intensive math class. (The rare girls proved hard to retain, his colleagues found, deterred by math-demon boys they considered “little creeps” and by t
he stigma of seeming “different.”)
It was the prelude to a flurry of experiments with, as he put it, a “smorgasbord of accelerative opportunities.” After 18 hours devoted to Algebra I, most of the class of rising seventh graders performed as well on tests of the material as the top 40 percent of ninth graders who would have spent 135 to 150 hours. Stanley even ventured the stunt of bringing in seventy-five students and trying to teach them Algebra I in a day—and got a third of them through it. “But we decided we didn’t want to play that kind of show-off stuff. That was not necessary. We would have Saturday classes and do things a little more leisurely and in intensive fashion.” There was a reason he got the nickname Mr. Acceleration.
And though Stanley acknowledged it was a “clumsy phrase,” there was a reason he coined “radical accelerants” to anoint the college-bound vanguard who scored around or above 700. Even, or especially, a “quiet revolution” needs publicizing, and the path of Stanley’s pioneers exemplified his vision: bypass obstacles (stodgy high schools) and amass advanced credit and degrees—as fast and with as little fuss as possible, to avoid the “tragic waste of a rare national resource.” Well before they had data, Stanley and his colleagues sped to the conclusion that he hoped to prove. “High test scores at an early age do not…merely indicate ‘developmental’ differences of rate or sequence,” he soon confidently pronounced. “They presage long-range, lasting differences in ultimate ability.” The dearth of girls, not to mention minority students, didn’t give him much pause.
Concerns voiced by other colleagues as they launched a Study of Verbally Gifted Youth in 1973 didn’t slow Stanley down either. They raised questions about the overarching endeavor of early test-based spotting of mature promise. Might they be winnowing too narrowly, overlooking crucial harbingers of future creativity? “For example, skills such as idea generation and question asking may be required in combination with traits such as tolerance for ambiguity, persistence, and propensity for reflection.” A score on an SAT, math or verbal, seemed notably inadequate to gauging such abilities and qualities—no easy feat to measure at all, especially in a preteen. But Stanley, dismissive of what he considered “vacuous talk about creativity,” was ready with a rather brusque verdict on the nonmath side of the project: “Too many chiefs, not enough Indians, all sort of interested in different things—empathy, for example.”