© 2025 WSHU
NPR News & Classical Music
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Gifted and talented

It’s Mozart’s birthday today, and that’s certainly not one to be forgotten, even if it was two hundred and sixty-nine years ago. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the aspirational poster child for the whole category of gifted and talented children. He started playing the piano at the age of three and composing at the age of six. When he was eight years old, the little boy amused himself by writing his first symphony for all the orchestra instruments.

History seems full of such astonishing child prodigies: the mathematician Blaise Pascal, the poet Alexander Pope, the artist Pablo Picasso, and hundreds of others. It’s a mystery where their gifts came from, but what they had in common was an early start. They focused on one passionate interest from childhood and stuck to it despite everything, even in spite of being labeled as odd or even abnormal.

There’s no way of measuring how many geniuses appear in any given place or time because they are not always recognized. In a more or less egalitarian society, a true genius may learn to hide his or her superiority, just as the driver of a Ferrari must keep it down to fifty-five miles an hour on our restricted roads, even if it can easily go at two hundred. Extreme cleverness, like extreme speed, may attract unwelcome attention.

All parents naturally want their children to be special. Every child might be a Mozart, just as any number on the roulette wheel might be a winner. Ambitious parents try hard to get their offspring into gifted and talented programs. Garrison Keillor, the host of Prairie Home Companion, liked to joke that all children in Lake Wobegon were above average. The joke is that only half of all children can ever be above average and the rest are inevitably below average, even in Minnesota. Only a tiny number are born with an extraordinary talent. But, in reality, not many parents want their children to be that different, let alone unique, like Mozart. Fitting in may be more important than standing out. The goal of gifted and talented programs is not to create genius but to open the doors to desirable professions that combine the maximum financial rewards with the minimum physical effort.

Modern childhood is so extended that there’s not much chance of starting a career early, except perhaps in sports or entertainment, where precocious talent is easily recognized and potentially profitable. Most young people are not expected to be capable of anything useful until they have been processed through the whole educational machinery from K to postgraduate. Even if a child does have a special gift, by graduation time, he or she may have forgotten what it was. Grades and credits and distribution requirements and multiple-choice tests have knocked any trace of genius out of them.

It is a curious fact that child geniuses are often rather childlike in adulthood. Mozart was a case in point; he never quite grew up, and you may be able to think of more recent examples where a few highly talented men are playing games with much more dangerous knowledge than string quartets. I heard an interview with the fine pianist Lang Lang, who was a child genius on the level of Mozart. He agreed that prodigies are often emotionally immature and said a wise thing: “You need to keep the genius and let the child go.”

David began as a print journalist in London and taught at a British university for almost 20 years. He joined WSHU as a weekly commentator in 1992, becoming host of Sunday Matinee in 1996.