When the child reaches senior high school, however, the case is somewhat different. The college preparatory course of the secondary school was originated with and for pupils of college caliber. It is therefore based on what very intelligent adolescents, and they only, can learn. Hence it offers to the pupil at and above 130 IQ (S-B) tasks of sufficient interest and difficulty to engage his powers of learning.
Laying aside, for purposes of the moment, argument as to whether the content of the college preparatory course is what it should be from all angles, we maintain that it is sufficiently abstract, complex, and difficult to operate as an intellectual stimulus for quite highly intelligent adolescents. I shall return to this point later, raising it here merely to explain why it has seemed to me especially important to work in the elementary school.
One cannot work for long in the elementary school, however, without becoming involved in research which has to do with the secondary school. There are many problems of coördination that require for their adequate study the joint efforts of both elementary and secondary school. We are currently trying to find answers to these problems at Public School 500, Manhattan, for we shall begin sending pupils from there to the senior high schools in June, 1939.
For some years, beginning about 1918, experimentation has been sporadically undertaken in New York City on the initiative of individual principals to find out what should be done in the elementary school for highly intelligent children. It was not, however, until January, 1936, that the Board of Education itself took official action in cognizance of the presence of these pupils in the school system. On January 28, 1936, Public School 500, Manhattan (Speyer School, [3] was founded by formal action of the Board of Education and Teachers College, jointly, for the study of intellectual deviates, other than the feeble-minded, in the elementary school.
Two classes for rapid learners were included in the setup of this school, to accommodate twenty-five pupils each. These classes have now (1939) been in progress for three years. Their chief purpose has been to find experimentally and to establish a curriculum that would provide a genuine education for children of mental calibers above 130 IQ (S-B); an education that would extend their minds and interest them in the interests of society during the years of the elementary school.