Why 'prodigies' shouldn't be at university at all

Child prodigies are better off learning about life along with their peers instead of being shut away in universities, argues DAVID ROBERTSON, dean of the Oxford college from which Ruth Lawrence graduated CHILD prodigies, to use the rather awful stock phrase, are nothing new.

The real thing, someone of phenomenal intelligence who achieves real scholarly capacity at a very early age, has cropped up in western history periodically throughout the ages - several of the great minds of the Renaissance were prodigies.

What the media usually mean by a child prodigy is a young adolescent who is accepted by a university around the age of 12 or 13, having achieved perfect A-level scores in a narrow range of mathematical and scientific subjects.

Rather than waiting for their child to achieve the marginally greater maturity of 17, the parents of such a child, with the collusion of admissions tutors, transfer their highly intelligent offspring to be taught yet more of that narrow range of subjects in a quasi-university environment. The child then graduates, usually with stunning grades, at about the age others matriculate; he or she then gets a doctorate just as their age-group graduates, finishes a post- doc when they start their PhDs, and is probably not heard of outside their professional circles again. (Though some, like Ruth Lawrence, who was a student while I was dean of her college, do make it back into the media just to establish that they are normal people who can get married have babies too.) Not surprisingly, things sometimes go wrong with this ideal academic track - somehow or other the world fails to co-operate with the attempt to jumpstart an academic career. Or, more precisely, sometimes things go wrong visibly enough for the media to notice - how much goes wrong more quietly is anybody's guess. Given the enormous range of problems ordinary undergraduates struggle through, not always without permanent harm in the high- pressure environment of a top university, it would be improbable if the "prodigies" didn't suffer, invisibly and fairly horribly.

Those outside the universities have no idea of the amount of money, effort and manpower that has to be spent on the pastoral side of university teaching just to get the average 18-year-old through to graduation. (Although bodies like the Quality Assurance Agency, which monitors university teaching, are well aware of the problems, and attach great importance to how well universities handle this side of their activities when they grade us.) In practice, child prodigies - I continue to use the short hand - can only get through universities by effectively not being there. They do not experience undergraduate life: having been cheated of the joys as well as the tribulations of the later school years, they go on to skip another formative experience.

They jump from a probably rather restricted childhood to a technically superbly trained young adulthood. And that is the problem.

Child prodigies (media usage) occur in the sciences only; the real child prodigies, the real geniuses, crop up at random everywhere in the intellectual firmament. There are two related reasons for this.

The first is that the sort of intellectual capacity that occurs, not that rarely in highly abstract disciples (and in other intellectual pursuits such as, for example, playing chess or in music), is highly solipsistic - it does not require interaction with the real world, and especially not with the world of people. No experience is needed to be a brilliant mathematician or chess player.

Child-prodigy historians or sociologists would almost be a contradiction in terms.

Secondly, only a very narrow conception of why one sends a young person to university at all is compatible with the child-prodigy theory. No admissions tutor in history, literature or even economics would accept a 13-year-old, because there would be very little we could do to educate them - educate, not train.

MY field of expertise is in judicial politics. I could not conceivably help a 13-year-old grasp the problems thrown up by judicial discretion in lawmaking, even if some combination of superb analytic IQ and eidetic memory might have got them 100 per cent in a multiple choice test of constitutional law. Indeed, very bright 18- year-olds only catch a glimmer of what was at stake in the great judicial decisions of political history.

Universities are not just the next technical step on an educational conveyor belt after schools. They are a qualitative, as well as quantitative jump, a completely different experience. Yes, you can take a high-performing mathematician, carve out a special enclave within a university city, draft in talented maths teachers and get them through finals. Given the wonders of distance-learning, one could do all of that while leaving them in their homes, and one might just as well do that, because the child is never going to university anyway.

Universities, of course, used to be just like boarding schools at a small remove. Even when I was an undergraduate we were theoretically locked into single-sex colleges at 11pm. A generation or so before, there used to be compulsory prayers every morning. But universities are now, if not quite like ordinary life, certainly not protected and enclosed environments, and undergraduates are not guarded, guided and patrolled. They are legally adults, and insist on that.

We treat them like that. Even if we didn't have to for legal reasons, we would do so because otherwise the three or four years of a first degree would be a restricting experience making our graduates totally unfit for anything, and, to return to my main point, incapable of grasping the understanding of modern society we strive so hard to achieve ourselves and pass on as tutors.

So why send a 13-year-old to a pseudo-university for training rather than letting them learn broadly with their peers? Perhaps because our schools are stunningly incapable of providing a rewarding intellectual environment for the very able?

* Professor David Robertson is Senior Tutor at St Hugh's College, Oxford.

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