Now the truth is that children of great ability are virtually as helpless as any others under authorities blind to their exceptionality. It would be an impossibly strong and shrewd child who could today conduct his own education under the compulsory school laws; make money to live on and accumulate funds for his own higher education under the child-labor laws--all in the first eighteen years of his life. Yet this seems to be what elderly society has vaguely in mind, when reiterating that "the bright will take care of themselves."
It is common to refer in this connection to the fact that Mr. John D. Rockefeller had earned and saved a large sum of money by the time he was sixteen years old. However, in this day and age Mr. Rockefeller would have been arrested on the double charge of truancy and violation of the child-labor law, and would have had no savings whatsoever at sixteen years of age. It is shocking to think of Mr. Rockefeller standing at ten years of age before the Juvenile Court, but such would be his situation were he a ten-year-old child _today_ instead of having been such nearly a hundred years ago. In our day a ten-year-old acquires no merit by staying out of school and engaging in the egg business. He acquires, instead, a court summons.
What is needed for the support and development of those children whom we see before us daily, and who represent scores of others in the same economic condition, is what we may call a revolving foundation. By this is meant a fund from which the gifted young could draw at any age the means for their development, with the moral (not legal) obligation to repay according to ability to do so, after twenty years, without interest. By this plan the superior could invest in themselves; very little money would actually be spent, because it would come back again, and the nation would always benefit in ways not now fully foreseeable. The establishment of a revolving fund for the development of tested children would be another "new thing under the sun." It would be a great experiment in social science, now rendered possible for the first time by inventions and discoveries in the field of child psychology.
[1] _Teachers College Record_, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1938), pages 296-306.