How to raise a genius

If you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements in the field. To learn how to paint beautifully, visit the National Gallery. If you want to be a great scientist, spend some time in cutting-edge laboratories. If you want to write, read great literature. But this is not what parents usually think about when considering how to educate their children. Most simply outsource the work to existing bureaucracies. Is there, however, something that they could learn from the great figures of the past?

I sampled the biographies of 42 outstanding people: from writers (Woolf, Tolstoy) and mathematicians (Pascal, Turing) to philosophers (Russell, Descartes) and composers (Mozart, Wagner), trying to get a diverse sample. There is, it seems, a pattern in the childhoods of geniuses. Each involved a submersion in serious, intellectual discussion; limited contact with other children; and what’s called ‘cognitive apprenticeships’, the deliberate imparting and testing of knowledge.

The first principle of cultivating brilliance is based on the recognition that human beings are inherently social. They compulsively internalise values, ideas, skills and desires from the people around them. It’s therefore not surprising that those who grow up to be exceptional tend to have spent their formative years surrounded by exceptional adults.

Virginia Woolf never attended school. Her father, Leslie Stephen – who, along with tutors, educated Virginia and her sister Vanessa – was an editor, critic and biographer of such standing that he could invite Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Alfred, Lord Tennyson to dine and converse with his children. It was something he did deliberately for their benefit.

This parental obsession with curating a rich intellectual milieu comes through in nearly all of the biographies I read. Michel de Montaigne’s father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, so that Michel would learn it as his mother tongue. John Stuart Mill spent his childhood at his father’s desk, helping to write a treatise on economics, running over to Jeremy Bentham’s house to borrow books and discuss ideas.

Blaise Pascal, too, was home-schooled by his father, who chose not to teach him mathematics. Pascal Sr had a passion for maths that he felt was slightly unhealthy and feared the subject would distract the young Blaise from other rewarding pursuits such as literature – so Pascal had to teach himself. But when as a young teenager he rederived several of Euclid’s proofs, the family relocated to Paris to allow father and son to participate in the maths salons together. The instinct was to create a specific kind of culture for the child – not primarily to teach him.

At least two-thirds of my sample were home-educated (usually until about 12) by parents, governesses and tutors. The rest were educated in schools, most commonly Jesuit schools.

As children, they were integrated with exceptional adults – and taken seriously by them. When the five-year-old Bertrand Russell refused to believe the Earth was round, his grandparents didn’t laugh; they called in the vicar of the parish to reason him out of his misconception. The guardians of these brilliant people had high expectations of their charges, assuming they had the capacity to understand complex topics and to grow competent rapidly. They therefore invited them into serious conversations and meaningful work.

John von Neumann – the Hungarian physicist who helped to develop the hydrogen bomb and digital computer, and as a pastime invented game theory – was included in management discussions of his father’s bank before reaching school age. While writing his ten-volume History of British India, J.S. Mill’s father allowed his three-year-old son to interrupt him every time he encountered a Greek word he had not seen before.

Not everyone who grew to be exceptional was this lucky. There are a few cases of people who rose to greatness despite non-ideal circumstances – like Michael Faraday and the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. They had to summon mentors themselves. How did they do that?

First, they read books. Then, when they grew more skilled, they started contacting other exceptional people, trying to join their milieu. Ramanujan famously sent letters to a large number of English mathematicians, until one of them, G.H. Hardy, realised that this strange kid from India was not a crank but a raw genius, and brought him to Cambridge in 1914. Faraday grew up in poverty in early 19th-century London. He spent less than a year in school and then ended up as a bookbinder’s apprentice. The bookbinder seems to have been an intellectual role model, but more importantly, he gave Faraday access to books.

Faraday also started attending scientific lectures where he took copious notes. He turned Humphry Davy’s lecture series into a book, bound it and gave it to Davy. That, Davy thought, was a nice gesture and, having ruined his eyes in an experiment with nitrogen trichloride, accepted Faraday as an apprentice. Books can, in other words, be a good stand-in for a social milieu, but eventually you need direct access to exceptional people. And having access to them from a young age greatly increases the likelihood that you will be shaped by them.

Freedom from peer pressure is the second principle of extraordinary intellect. Russell, for example, was kept largely separate from other children, living secludedly in his grandparents’ aristocratic mansion, something many biographers lament. Just imagine, they seem to think, how brilliant he’d have been if he’d had access to schools.

In fact, the opposite is true. According to Russell, his ‘most important hours’ were spent alone, walking around the gardens of the neglected family estate: ‘I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.’

Russell’s childhood seems a little depressing, as does Virginia Woolf’s. In a letter to her brother Thoby, who was away at Cambridge, Woolf lamented: ‘I have to delve from books, painfully and alone, what you get every evening sitting over your fire and smoking your pipe with [Lytton] Strachey etc.’

This immersion in boredom is universal in the biographies of exceptional people. A substantial fraction were kept apart from other children, either because their guardians decided so or because (like René Descartes) they were bedridden with various illnesses. It may even be possible to say that too much socialising with other children is not good for intellectual development. A common theme in the biographies is that interest in complex topics appeared almost like a wild hallucination, induced by an overdose of boredom.

Mozart was drilled on the piano and violin by his father, but he undertook his compositions on his own. Like Pascal, Alan Turing, who was raised in boarding schools, seems to have taught himself mathematics (at 15, he derived the inverse tangent function before having encountered calculus) while being an outcast and facing resistance from the teachers, who thought his interests were not ‘well-rounded’.

Another case is James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish mathematician who unified electricity and magnetism in a series of equations of such power that the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann proclaimed: ‘Was it a God that wrote these signs?’

Maxwell grew up in relative isolation in Glenlair, a country house on the Middlebie estate in south-west Scotland in the 1830s. At an early age, Maxwell became fascinated by geometry and discovered the regular polyhedra before receiving any formal instruction. Instead of being tutored, his first ten years were spent reading novels with his mother, discussing farm improvements with his father, climbing trees, committing mischief and exploring fields and woods.

Most of the biographies show children who spent only between one and four hours a day in formal studies and the rest on self-directed projects. And when it comes to formal learning, one-on-one tutoring is a consistent theme. Some did all of their formal learning this way, such as Mill; others had it as a complement to schooling, such as Albert Einstein, who had a number of external maths tutors.

The American neuroscientist Erik Hoel has written about ‘aristocratic tutoring’ which involves strict teaching as well as more casual interactions. Aristocratic tutoring is not focused on measurables. Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in a particular field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity. The child would therefore be exposed to genuine expertise, even in a field they may not be interested in pursuing, and could learn the behaviours involved in cultivating such expertise.

The importance of tutoring was demonstrated by the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom in the 1980s. Bloom found that if you tailor your instruction to an individual, the average student will rise to the top two in a class of a hundred. Tutoring is one of the most reliable ways of imparting knowledge.

Granted, many of the tutors in the biographies are not particularly inspiring. Tolstoy’s, for instance, would threaten the boy with a beating if he cried. Russell was abused by several of his tutors and governesses. The best tutors, however – including parents – seem able to create a sense of a shared intellectual pursuit.

Von Neumann’s father once got so excited by their discussions about machine weaving that he set out to find a Jacquard loom that he and his son could study. Marie Curie’s father built a laboratory in their apartment so they could study chemistry. One of Virginia Woolf’s tutors, the classics scholar and women’s-rights advocate Janet Case, was so dear and important to Woolf that she wrote Case’s Times obituary nearly 40 years later.

Helping another person grow rapidly requires a deep and delicate bond. A tutor can be demanding, expecting sincere effort. But if the firmness does not come from respect – if they do not signal that they truly believe you are capable of more than you think – the harshness is degrading. I doubt the tyrannical tutors were important in shaping long-term trajectories in the cases of Tolstoy or Russell.

Finally, we come to the third principle: cognitive apprenticeships. Such apprenticeships take the form of teachers that explore ever more complex ideas and require their students to repeat and repurpose them. Every morning after breakfast, John Stuart Mill would take a walk with his father. In his autobiography, Mill writes:

In these frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give me explanations and ideas respecting civilisation, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he required me afterwards to restate to him in my own words. He also made me read, and give him a verbal account of, many books which would not have interested me sufficiently to induce me to read them of myself.

Mill’s father would model patterns of reasoning by thinking aloud and asking John to recreate his thoughts, imitating the thought patterns. He would give him increasingly complex tasks, then ask John questions that helped him solve the task. He would coach and give feedback on how to improve.

This type of intellectual apprenticeship is a recurring pattern in the biographies. At some point in their teenage years – and sometimes earlier – the future geniuses would be mentored by someone with exceptional capacity in their field.

Russell was discovered by Alfred North Whitehead, one of the world’s foremost philosophers and mathematicians, and collaborated with him in his twenties. The 17th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler was taken on by various members of the Bernoulli family, all of them extraordinary mathematicians. At this point, they were not only learning, but doing real intellectual work.

An important factor to acknowledge is that these children did not only receive an exceptional education; they were also exceptionally gifted. Like most of the people sampled in this essay, John von Neumann was fiendishly gifted. He could divide eight-digit numbers in his head at the age of six. When von Neumann entered university, George Pólya, another mathematician, recounts:

There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn’t say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann.

If we were to distribute clones of von Neumann in a random selection of western homes today, few – if any – would have the quality of education the original von Neumann had. Some might be broken by toxic family conditions. But most of the others would probably still be quite a sight. Maybe not the kind of ‘I’ll invent the computer, game theory and the hydrogen bomb at the same time’ level of genius – but not the average in their class.

Innate talent is clearly a part of excellence. Richard Wagner was taught piano by his Latin teacher but dropped the instrument because he was unable to understand scales. Instead, Wagner learned by transcribing theatre music by ear. Once he had reached the end of his natural abilities, he sought out a composer, Christian Gottlieb Müller, and convinced his mother to allow Müller to teach him composition. Wagner was 13 at the time. Two years later, he was able to transcribe Beethoven’s Ninth symphony for piano. I have known quite a few talented musicians, and that simply never happens.

But this is not to say that the peculiarities of the education of history’s exceptionals were unimportant or not worth emulating. Access to exceptional role models, and dedicated, personalised education, is transformational. In some cases, as with Mill, it is possible that most of his skill can be attributed to education, rather than innate talent.

Doing all of this – that is, curating an exceptional milieu, providing dedicated tutoring and opportunities for apprenticeship – is hard work. Like everything pursued to the point of excellence, it demands serious sacrifices.

Yet simply being aware of these principles does not require sacrifice. It is a way of viewing children: as capable of competence, as craving meaningful work and as worthy of being included in serious discussions. We can learn to see them like that, but it is a profound shift in perception, a shift away from the ways in which we are taught to regard children.

There is a scene in Mill’s autobiography, when John is about to set out into the world and his father for the first time lets him know that his education had been… a bit particular. He would discover that others his age did not know as much as he did. But, his father said, he mustn’t feel proud about that. He’d just been lucky.

Let’s make more people lucky.