The destiny of a child prodigy: graduate from school at 8 years old. What's next?

Novye Izvestia listened to different opinions.

Yelena Ivanova, Natalia Seibil

There are few real geeks - one in five million people, science says. Despite the fact that each parent considers their child a genius, only a very small percentage of children - from 6 to 10% - are classified by scientists as gifted. As a rule, these are children under 10 years of age, whose intelligence is early manifested in areas with narrow parameters and characterized by repetitions. This is, first of all, about mathematics, chess, music, natural sciences.

Mathematician, professor at the Italian University Andrei Sarychev offhand recalls the outstanding mathematician of our time, Terence Tao. Tao is of Chinese origin, was born in Australia and now works in America. He is now 40 years old and has already won the Nobel Prize in mathematics - the Fields Prize. From the age of five he amazed the world with his mathematical abilities. Sarychev calls Tao a genius in the full sense of the word. Andrei Sarychev does not consider himself a child prodigy, although he entered Phystech at the age of 14:

- My early graduation from high school and going to university arose from the fact that I entered the first grade at the age of six and, in addition, jumped from the third grade to the fifth. Therefore, from the fifth grade I studied among children who are one and a half to two years older than me. If there were any problems of socialization, it was in the fifth grade. I was no longer at the university, because I ended up in the same age environment.

For teachers, highly gifted children are not an object of pride, but, rather, heightened care and excitement, and sometimes even frustration.Alisa Teplyakova , about whom all newspapers and information portals of Russia write, causes rather sadness in the famous Russian teacher and public figure Yevgeny Yamburg. Of course, there have always been young geniuses. From an early age, Mozart traveled around Europe with his father, composed music and performed in front of the mighty of this world. At the age of eight, the French mathematician Pascal, without even knowing the names of the geometric figures, himself proved the 32nd Euclidean theorem on the sum of the angles of a triangle, and at the age of 17, having written a book on conical sections, he derived a theorem later named after him.

But in the case of Alice, Evgeny Yamburg is something different - "the excessive ambition of parents and a PR game":

- Here, look, an 8-year-old child. She can think well logically, learn the content of works, mathematical things, physics. But to really master Tolstoy's "War and Peace" even in the approach of a teenager or "Crime and Punishment" - well, of course not. In this situation, there is neither emotional experience nor personal maturity that occurs in adolescence.

Alisa's dad Evgeny Teplyakovdoes not agree with this. In Belarus, all children go to school from the age of 6, in the UK - from the age of five. Chinese kids write hieroglyphs from the age of three and solve examples. In Russia, the school begins at the age of seven - and period:

- Even if at four he counts and reads at a speed of one hundred words per minute, he will be sent to the class, where they read "The Turnip" by syllables. This is an artificial slowdown in development! What time will an ordinary student graduate from school - at 18? Another six years - the bachelor's plus master's program at the university. Four years postgraduate study. And when to live? To build a career, start a family, give birth to children?

Psychologist, Academician of the Russian Academy of Education, Head of the Department of Personality Psychology at Lomonosov Moscow State University Alexander Asmolov has been working at the Faculty of Psychology for 50 years. It is here that Alisa Teplyakova will come to study. For the faculty, a new student will be a serious challenge. To what extent can a university, in general, and a faculty, in particular, be a suitable place for a girl? Can the world of higher education create an individual development program for a child so that she does not suffer and her talents develop? The fact is that gifted children delight their parents with their successes and show themselves in certain areas as the best, brightest and strongest. But when a child finds himself in a different environment, it turns out that the university, even the best in the country, is a subculture that has nothing to do with his individual abilities. Even if senior students take care of her, says teacher Yevgeny Yamburg, everything will be according to Pushkin: “She seemed like a stranger in her family as a girl.” When Alice was asked what she likes to read, she replied: "Fairy tales."

The child remains a child, and he lives in the world of adults with other interests, with attitudes and values different from his own, psychologist Asmolov agrees with the teacher:

“As a result, in such situations, what we call personal dissonance arises, when a child is cognitively, cognitively advanced and, moreover, literally“ starry ”, but he finds himself in the world of adults who do not understand this starryness. The child is very often deprived of the possibility of socialization, literally in the airless space of interpersonal communication. This leads to the fact that in some cases, anxiety increases sharply, which can develop into neuroticism and many other problems of psychological development.

Professor Sarychev was lucky - he experienced his problems of socialization when he jumped from the third grade to the fifth. In the university they were no longer there, because he was in the same age environment.

- I lived in a hostel for the first two years. At Phystech, where I studied, even Muscovites live in a hostel. This life in a hostel, of course, socialized me. In general, the university in which I studied was and remains a purely male, a rather specific environment. It was quite a serious pre-socialization for me, but I did not experience any problems.

Now Andrei Sarychev teaches mathematics himself and calls it an occupation for very young people. Of course, at the age of 10-12, children do not have time to gain the amount of knowledge that is necessary to work at a modern level. This takes time. Therefore, it is possible to imagine a 19-year-old man doing something serious, but hardly much earlier, the professor believes:

- There are not very many such examples among outstanding mathematicians, I think it is not difficult to find someone who graduated from school at the age of 16, but this is not at eight or nine.

There is no consensus among experts about what happens to geeks after their sharp intellectual start. Educators warn that there are many dangers for gifted children. Some of them belong to the schizoid type, and then very great pedagogical knowledge is required from the parents. Evgeny Yamburg speaks about such situations with undisguised anxiety:

- If such a child has not won the international Olympiad, for him it is frustration with aggression. If he even got 4, it is immediately frustration with aggression. And we know cases when in elite lyceums they shot at a teacher who gave four. A child is such a complex matter, it all requires such delicacy. Parents say that he has mastered the program. What does it mean? What program did he master? What subjects?

They, like a torpedo, start abruptly upward and quickly burn out. Academician Asmolov recalls the formula of Vladimir Vysotsky "I pulled 10 thousand, like 500, and got baked." An early start involves a lot of risks, when the three ages of a person - chronological, sociological and psychological - differ greatly.

Chronological age is calendar years, what is recorded on his birth certificate. Sociological age is understood as the situation of a person's interaction with the outside world, when he gives him the right to make decisions. Suffice it to recall the heroes of the civil war, Blucher or Tukhachevsky, when, as young people, they led whole armies.

And there is a psychological age, determined by the orientation of motives - where a person is looking, into the past or the future.

- For me, the sad characteristic that the prodigies Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky gave to the prodigies is highlighted. He uttered a murderous phrase, somehow polemicizing and remembering Liszt: "The future of the prodigy is in his past." This is a tragic phrase. Is there a collapse of time perspective in gifted children? This is a very big and difficult question. Doesn't it turn out that way, remembering Vygotsky, when the future of geeks is in the past, it is that geeks turn into old people 13, 14 years old, and sometimes even earlier ages. And then we have little old men in front of us, - says Asmolov.

However, there are researchers who do not consider gifted people to be potential losers. American scientist Lewis Terman followed for 30 years over 1,500 geeks who were born with much higher intelligence than others, with IQs ranging from 140 to 200. Among his wards, 88% went to college, 68% graduated from college, half with honors. The divorce and suicide rate did not exceed the average. In general, Terman's charges grew up into successful, healthy, well-rounded adults with good jobs and good income. Being born smart isn't enough to be successful. Adult genius is a product of habits and personality, says Malcolm Gladwell.

In the modern world, parents of gifted children face a difficult task. Academician Asmolov, when asked what he would do if he had such a child, replied that family education would be key for him. “I would not give my child to any pawnshop, even if this pawnshop is called“ university ”.

But interaction with peers, with the children's subculture today is becoming more important than ever. If earlier the zone of the child's proximal development, according to Vygotsky's definition, of the height that he can reach was communication with adults, now it is turning into a zone of variable development. These are the tasks that the child solves with his peers. The separation from them leads to serious risks for child development. Today social networks develop children more than communication with adults.

- There are cultures in which the adult culture can no longer lead the development of the child. Today in life we have moved on to these situations. It is no coincidence that in the world of the Internet we call ourselves digital migrants, and the children there are digital natives. How can I, as a digital migrant, explain something to a digital aborigine living in the world of digital culture? Today's key drama is the drama of teachers lagging behind students.

Gifted children need to be loaded with other spheres of activity. Learn another foreign language with him, let the child play music or sports, experts advise. The most important thing that everyone, both psychologists and teachers, warns against is that parents do not rely on the training of "Olympians" in the development of their children and do not force them to solve problems 15 hours a day. This is not the path, but the mania of the parents themselves, which kills the child. The worst disease of the 21st century is leadership disease, when adults drive children into adult worlds. But childhood is one of the greatest achievements of mankind and one of the greatest values. Parents are personally responsible for it to their children.