W. H. Brady Scholar  Charles Murray

I define the "intellectually gifted" as those individuals who can stand out in almost any profession. Research indicates an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed to achieve this. This covers the top 10 percent of the IQ distribution, or about a million people out of Australia's total labour force.

In professions such as medicine, engineering, law, the sciences and academia, most people must, by the nature of the selection process, have IQs better than 120. But people with IQs of 120 or higher also occupy most of the top positions in corporations and the senior ranks of government. They produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs we watch. They are the people who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.

Combine these groups, and the top 10 percent of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. It follows that our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with high intelligence.

Most Australian children with IQs above 120 get the opportunity for higher education, and large numbers of them end up attending the most prestigious universities. It would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is the amount of education they get, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children.

The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens. We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, and this sounds elitist.

Because of this reluctance to acknowledge intellectual differences, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift, and that they are not superior human beings but lucky ones. They are never told that their gift brings with it obligations, and that the most important and most difficult of these obligations is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this".

Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as their less talented peers do. That can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. The gifted need to be educated with each other, not to be coddled but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

The encouragement of wisdom also requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level. They also need to be steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good. And the encouragement of wisdom requires an advanced knowledge of history. Never has the aphorism about the fate of those who ignore history been more true than it is today.

Unfortunately, most of this is antithetical to the mind-set that now dominates mainstream educational thinking. To be wise, gifted children need to learn how to make accurate judgments, but many educators want to teach them to be non-judgmental. To be wise, bright children need to be exposed to the best that has come before them, but many educators insist on treating all cultures as equally valuable and avoid discriminating between them. Educators say they want our little darlings to express themselves, but the primary purpose of education should be to give children the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.

What I am calling for is a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty.

If you don't like the sound of that, reflect on the fact that the only leaders we get to choose are our elected officials. In all other areas, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose, and there is nothing we can do to change this. All we can do is try to educate this elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at AEI.