Educational psychology works constantly to find ways of knowing how to identify these additional elements. It will be a long time before we advance to a point where we can measure these as well as we can now measure intelligence. Some of these additional qualifications are undoubtedly as essential to leadership as intelligence is. A rascal, a coward, a liar, a tyrant, a panderer, a fanatic, an invalid, is not a desirable leader, no matter whether his IQ is 200. We must learn to select from among the highly intelligent those who have the greatest number of additional qualifications. We must learn what these additional qualifications are. One knows them when one sees them in action. For example, an eleven-year-old boy of IQ close to 180 decided to run for the office of class president in the senior high school to which he had been accelerated. His classmates were around sixteen years of age. During the electioneering a proponent of a rival candidate arose to speak against the eleven-year-old, and he said, among other things, "Fellows, we don't want a president in knee pants!"
In the midst of the applause following this remark, the eleven-year-old arose, and waving his hand casually in the direction of the full-length portrait of George Washington on the wall, he said, "Fellows, try to remember that when George got to be the Father of our country he was wearing knee pants." The eleven-year-old was elected by a large majority. He gave evidence not only of an IQ of 180, but also of the additional qualities of political leadership in highest degree: audacity, presence of mind, good humor, grace, and, above all, the genuine desire to be a popular leader. He knew how to bridge, by a debonair gesture, the great gap between him and those to be led.
This boy had qualities of _political_ leadership. This limiting adjective opens the large subject of the different kinds of leaders. Leaders of whom, and for what ends? Observation of children suggests that there is a direct ratio between the intelligence of the leader and that of the led. To be a leader of his contemporaries, a child must be more intelligent, but _not too much more intelligent_, than those who are to be led. There are rare exceptions to this principle, as in the case we have cited. But, generally speaking, a leadership pattern will not form--or it will break up--when a discrepancy of more than about 30 points of IQ comes to exist between the leader and the led.