Book: A Forgotten Voice: A Biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth

I have been intrigued by Leta Stetter Hollingworth, have wanted to know more about her, ever since I read this quotation by her: "In the ordinary elementary school situation, children of 140 IQ waste half of their time. Those above 170 IQ waste practically all of their time" (see article by Kathi Kearney).

Hollingworth's classic book, Children Above 180 IQ, based on a longitudinal study she began in 1916 and continued through the 1920s and 1930s, is practically impossible to find for sale, and when it occasionally becomes available as a used copy, it can be priced around $500 due to its rarity and desirability within the gifted world. It seems to be available only in university libraries in the Bay Area.

The next best thing I could find was a 2002 biography of Hollingworth, available used through Amazon.com. A Forgotten Voice: A Biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth, by Ann G. Klein, was published by Great Potential Press, Inc., which is led by Jim Webb and specializes in gifted education resources. It is wonderful that Great Potential Press brings out the titles it does, but it is alarming to me how quickly such books go out of print. Eight years after this book was published, Hollingworth's work is in as much danger of being forgotten as ever.

Her work was critically important, especially her founding of the field of gifted education. She did other very important work in educational psychology, but her greatest contributions were in establishing that gifted children needed special guidance to reach their potentials, and that there was broad variability in those potentials and in the children's life experiences based on their levels of giftedness.

Hollingworth was considered an eminent scientist in her day. From her post as a professor at Teachers College, part of Columbia University, she conducted research, wrote articles and books, gave many presentations, and guided doctoral students. She started her career doing research to refute the widely held belief that the intelligence of women suffered during their menstrual periods. Her subsequent studies of the variability of human intelligence ranged from subjects with "subnormal" intelligence to those with the highest levels of giftedness. She was a strong opponent of group intelligence testing, asserting that only individualized testing could evaluate "the whole child" and fully ascertain that child's abilities.

Profoundly gifted herself, Hollingworth knew personally of the social and emotional difficulties of children at the highest levels of intelligence. She considered children of IQ 120-155 to be of "optimal intelligence," because they would be able to fit in with many other people in society, but those at higher IQ levels almost always experienced difficulty in "fitting in" due to the extreme differences in their feelings and perceptions of the world, even compared to other gifted children at lower IQs.

Hollingworth advocated that highly gifted children be both accelerated and segregated into programs for the gifted in which they could study more broadly and deeply than the general curriculum allowed. She felt that giftedness was innate but that only if that giftedness was nurtured would society reap the benefits of the optimal contributions of its most capable members.

Author Klein summarizes Hollingworth's assertions to her colleagues as follows, that "(1) human beings, from birth and throughout their lives, differ in all measurable physical and mental traits; (2) differences in mental traits are of a greater range than differences in physical abilities; (3) human variations can be plotted on a bell-curve distribution, and that each individual has a place on that curve that will probably be maintained; and (4) the principles of individual differences apply to the general intelligence trait."

Hollingworth suggested, Klein reports, that unresolved conflicts in America between liberty and equality resulted in major problems in education and in society generally. Because of this unresolved conflict, Hollingworth wrote, there existed "...malice toward excellence. Excellence is hated in America today... Any one whose professional interest has led him much into contact with the education of very gifted children will readily agree with this. The most unpopular request one can make of foundations for the promotion of human welfare is for funds to study or promote the welfare of gifted children."

Although in many ways much progress has been made since Hollingworth's untimely death from cancer in 1939, in many other ways the situation remains alarmingly as she described it then. And especially with the economic crisis our country faces now, we've seen gifted programs to be among the first cut, as if they are extra, as if they are not essential for the population that needs them.

One unfortunate reason Hollingworth may not have been revered through all the years since her death is that she was a eugenicist. She felt that some people were simply superior to others in all ways and that society would be better off if they reproduced more frequently, and "inferior" peoples would reproduce less. Of course, many otherwise important and valuable thinkers shared her opinion at the time. Lewis Terman, who developed the Stanford-Binet intelligence test and identified and studied populations of gifted children in California, was also a eugenicist. So were Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), Theodore Roosevelt, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, and a host of others. That does not make this view acceptable, but the context of the times casts at least a different light upon it. The world had not yet come to know of the atrocities the Nazis committed in the name of this philosophy, or begun its moral awakening about these views and progress toward civil rights for all and a humanity that embraces all humans as precious. We are still working on that, and there are many people in the world who do not yet "get it." Still, it is very disappointing that so great a mind, with such visionary ideas about intelligence and the education of gifted children, was not so great as to see beyond the anti-semitic, racist, and classist views of her time.

Nevertheless, Hollingworth's contributions to our understanding of giftedness were profound, as were her recommendations for educating gifted students. I'm glad I read this book and learned more about this very unusual pioneer of educational psychology.

For those who are interested in longitudinal studies of profoundly gifted children, I highly recommend a more recent book than Hollingworth's, one by Miraca Gross, Exceptionally Gifted Children. Although it is also out of print and used copies are similarly outrageously priced at $190 on Amazon.com, at least they now have a Kindle edition for a mere $46.58. Hopefully more such important books will be made available in electronic editions. We need them.