354 J. SANDERS 



Terman, by the American Army during the war, by Prak, Hartnacke and 

 Kramer, Duff and Thomson. 



5. The fact that there are higher and lower classes of the population is not due 

 to any fortuitous circumstance. 



The more gifted a child is the more chance he has of rising in the social 

 scale, for in these days of democracy many intellectual children of less well- 

 to-do parents are given an opportunity to develop their gifts, thanks to the 

 financial help granted by the State or obtained from private sources. And 

 if for some reason or other these children do not, after all, succeed in using 

 their intellectual gifts to reach a higher rung of the social ladder, the next 

 generation may have better luck. As a rule it takes more than one genera- 

 tion to achieve the social rise although often enough the highest offices are 

 filled by persons who, as children, belonged to the lowest group of the popu- 

 lation. America numbers many such gifted personalities among her sons, 

 and Europe can also be proud of a few such examples. 



6. In addition to the inborn aptitudes, environment will also influence the 

 development of gifted subjects, but this outside influence is of relatively small 

 account. 



Environment certainly has some influence but only in the nature of a 

 stimulus. It cannot engender gifts when none are inborn. Besides the 

 social environment, the urban environment is also of importance. In the 

 towns the process of selection was and continues to be much more intense 

 than in the provinces, or rather the rural districts. 



7. Gifted subjects should therefore be given the best opportunities to develop 

 their talents. 



This is made very clear in the foregoing comments, but we see that, in 

 practice, more attention is bestowed, more energy and more money are 

 spent on the mentally deficient child than on the gifted child. The gifted 

 child is made to take a back seat for he is sure to succeed, or so we think. 

 And the literature on the subject contains relatively little on gifted people 

 while an enormous amount of writing has been devoted to the socially in- 

 ferior. 



8. The offspring of gifted parents have a bigger chance than others of being 

 above the average. 



Galton has already calculated the chances which an individual, owing to 

 his blood relationship with an eminent man, has of being himself considered 

 eminent. In 1928 Wingfields published the results of his investigations on 

 this aspect of the question. 



9. We are compelled indirectly to separate the gifted as a group from the 

 others. 



