Gifted Children Grown Up. Joan Freeman. (David Fulton Publishers)

When we remember those gifted children at school are we now happy if they have not done outstandingly well in life? And do we consider life itself to be a better test than those tedious exams we used to sit and suffer? Similarly, have we any idea what is meant by gifted?

Joan Freeman’s lovely book, so full of good sense, approaches all such questions head on, and hundreds more. Why do parents think their child is gifted? How often are they right? Do teachers have a better idea, and what encourages giftedness? Essentially this volume is Book Number 3 in a series, its predecessors published in 1979 and 1991, with each of them being reports on work started by the author in 1974.

As a society we can care more for the least gifted, with egalitarian principles hoping they will gain most from education, and expecting the gifted to do well in any case. But what if football promoters behaved in that fashion, disregarding the skilled juveniles and fostering the least proficient? Unfortunately the comparison soon loses its validity, with the brain so different from a pair of cunning feet. Being labelled gifted, said one pupil, was ‘the bane of my life’. A ‘highly gifted’ student went to sleep on reaching Oxford University, just going shopping, drinking tea, reading books – ‘anything but work, really’.

Such a subject as intellectual prowess can cause many a writer to favour stolid phraseology, if burdened with learned jargon. Professor Freeman writes with a refreshing directness and simplicity. The gifted 'need specific help – you can’t play a violin without a violin.’ ‘The Eleven-Plus examination was one of the grandest experiments in education the world has ever known. Many good things came out of that child-sorting system, most notably the concern with ability rather than money … Several British Prime Ministers, including Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and John Major found political fortune from a background of eleven-plus success in the Grammar Schools.’

Cleverly she permits/encourages/causes her interviewees to speak as clearly as her own prose. ‘All your life chances are restricted if you’re born into working class.’ ‘I couldn’t be bothered with anybody who was prepared to exclude me in terms of background.’ ‘One of our best teachers very rarely gets round to doing any of the syllabus.’ Even the questioned parents make straightforward sense. ‘The school sent her to the child guidance clinic, and they said her IQ was at gifted level, but the gap between her intelligence and her fine coordination was absolutely awful.’

Of course a reader can wonder if Joan Freeman was herself ‘gifted’. If so, it is plain that giftedness can continue. If not, there is good hope for all those not so labelled in their childhoods. Whatever she was, this psychologist author has made a very spirited rendering of all her adult years of work.

Anthony Smith