All the world extended best wishes to Master Kenneth Brown of Philadelphia, who at the age of eight heard his Israeli Rhapsody played by the Philadelphia Orchestra and praised by musicians and critics. He has an excellent chance to become a successful and perhaps famous adult.
2 Through the ages child prodigies have been regarded by the “old wives” of tradition as unnaturally or diabolically gifted, apt to burn out young and land on the junk pile. The figures do not bear this out. Most exceptionally bright children grow into exceptionally bright adult.
3 For nearly forty years the Milwaukee Journal library has kept a “Child Prodigies” file. More than a hundred names are listed ---- boys and girls who broke into the news at ages three to twelve as poets, musicians, mathematics wizards, university students. More than 90 per cent of these names are forgotten by the world. Some of the cards, however, carry familiar names: Yehudi Menuhin, eight; Ruth Slenczynaska, six; Philippa Schuyler, three. They are now grown up, from their twenties into their forties and all have become noted musicians.
4 In a study of three hundred men and women of genius, Dr. Catherine M. Cox and her colleagues at Stanford University found that almost all of them had been unusually perceptive children, even though this fact had not always been recognized. The beloved author Oliver Goldsmith, for example, was pronounced by his earliest teachers to be “dull, stupid, a heavy blockhead,little better than a fool whom everybody made fun of.” Actually, the teachers were too obtuse to understand the overly sensitive child; at home he was writing with surprising skill and astonishing his family.