The Last Lion, written about Winston Churchill, has an excellent discussion of “genius” and it is important to understand. I was often compared to Churchill and I thought those comparisons were nuts. I was not a politician. However, there is more to it than merely what someone does that is critical. This label of “genius” is misunderstood. It is not someone who knows-everything, or can memorize the contents of books. It is about exploring the would around you, willing to grasp new points of view, and effectively THINK OUT OF THE BOX rather than repeating the same nonsense over and over again. If you are reading this, the odds are you are among the 10% who are the real MOVERS AND SHAKERS. You can look at the numbers that elected a president You will discover that NOT even FDR was elected with 60%. Effectively, you have 45% Republican and 45% Democrat and no matter what evidence you present, they will never change their mind. The open-minded people who think out of the box is about 10%. It is something to encourage your children to grasp.
Here is a quote worth reading:
“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 possessors 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 Minnesota 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. E. Paul Torrance of Minnesota found that 70 percent of pupils rated high in creativity were rejected by teachers picking a special class for the intellectually gifted. The Goertzels concluded that a Stanford study of genius, under which teachers selected bright children, would have excluded Churchill, Edison, Picasso, and Mark Twain.
None of this was known to Welldon and his staff, but as term succeeded term an awareness grew among them that Winston was a baffling boy. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn the ablative absolute – a minor feat of memory – but he could recite twelve hundred lines of Macaulay…”
