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.