The name of William James Sidis is practically forgotten today. This boy's IQ was 260 points - 90 more than Albert Einstein. Thanks to his intelligence, he became the youngest student in the history of Harvard. However, his genius is not a coincidence, but the result of an experiment, the end result of which was far from a happy ending.
Behind William's genius was the boy's father, Boris Sidis. He was born in 1867 in Berdyczów, from which Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, later known as Joseph Conrad, also came, and where Balzak married Ewelina Hańska. Borys came from a poor Jewish family, which, however, did not prevent him from getting a good education and achieving success in life. However, this road was very bumpy for him.
Sidis Sr. believed that education is the basis of freedom and that everyone should have the right to it. For financial reasons, he decided to become a self-taught person, and then began to pass the acquired knowledge to local peasants. Unfortunately, the tsarist authorities did not like teaching the villagers to read, write and count. For his good intentions, Boris was imprisoned for two years, and after his release, he had to flee the country from the wave of Jewish pogroms , sweeping through the Russian Empire.
This is how Sidis, twenty-something years old, found himself overseas, where he entered Harvard University. There he obtained further academic degrees and climbed the career ladder. After a short time he became a member of the establishment, writing down on the pages of history, among others as one of the co-founders of the New York Psychiatric Institute and the scientific journal "Journal of Abnormal Psychology".
The work and thinking of Boris were greatly influenced by the psychologist and philosopher William James. He was a precursor of humanistic psychology and behaviorism, and a phenomenologist, supporting, inter alia, development of functionalism. His research inspired Sidis to conduct an experiment that changed the life of his unborn son. And not necessarily for the better.
A genius is born
In the USA, Boris met his future wife, Sarah Mandelbaum, whose family also fled Russia to America before the pogroms. The chosen one of his heart was one of ambitious people. She graduated from Boston School of Medicine and was one of the few women who could boast a medical degree at the time.
However, she decided to abandon all of this when she became pregnant. Here the Sidis family stood before the chance to prove that every human being is able to achieve a lot. It was enough to subject him to proper training that would unleash its true potential.
Borys Sidis
On April 1, 1898, William James Sidis was born, named after Boris' mentor. The parents almost immediately started the process of teaching the boy, incl. by showing him letters or teaching him the correct pronunciation. Their efforts quickly began to bear fruit. At 18 months, little Billy was already reading The New York Times, and as a 4-year-old he wrote his first book in two languages - English and French. As an 8-year-old, he not only spoke 8 languages fluently, but also created his own - vendergood. The effects of parental efforts were also clearly seen in the boy's IQ tests.
The genius child quickly became interested in the press, and William soon became a favorite of journalists. After all, it was supposed to be living proof that there is a genius in each of us. All it took was "proper training" to reveal it.
Training makes perfect?
William's parents, especially his father, triumphed. In six years, Borys published 10 books and a large number of scientific articles in which he described his son's path to success. It was based not only on very early education but also on treating the boy seriously.
"We decided from the very beginning to treat Billy as an adult" - she wrote in the unpublished book How to raise a genius Sarah Sidis.
Boris told me that a child's mind can be shaped long before he can speak . That if parents are rational, provide truthful information and justify it logically, it will sharpen the possibilities of even the youngest child. After all, the mind builds up like muscles, and these don't come from lying in bed. We were supposed to encourage our child to think, to follow any path he wishes, to develop his interests. We were to answer all his questions with precision and as long as he thought he had had an answer.
Boris Sidis has become an authority on raising children for many, but his methods did not impress everyone. One of his opponents was Sigmund Freud himself, who was not only to value Boris' intelligence low, but also considered him a dishonest psychologist. Such a lack of acceptance and criticism of Sidis' educational methods made him want to prove the correctness of his assumptions even more.
One of his opponents was Sigmund Freud himself, who was not only to value Boris' intelligence low, but also considered him a dishonest psychologist.
By the time William turned 9, his parents decided that he had acquired all the knowledge in elementary and high school, and it was time to send the boy to college. Of course, the choice fell on Boris' home university - Harvard University.
William passed the entrance exams with flying colors, but they did not guarantee him a place among the students of a prestigious school. The university authorities did not want to accept Sidis because they believed that despite the high level of mental development the boy was not emotionally ready for such a challenge. He was still a child, not a young adult - it was feared that because of this he would not be able to cope with the pressure he would have to face.
This opinion, however, did not receive a positive response from the press, which began to campaign to pressure Harvard to give "the smartest child in the world" a chance. And we did it! In 1909, at the age of 11, William Sidis became the youngest student in the history of the school.
The rebellion of a genius child
He was doing very well intellectually, especially in mathematics. He was hailed by one of his professors as "the future of 20th century mathematics" . William not only gained knowledge, but also supported his older colleagues and several lecturers from the Harvard Math Club. He also wrote a much appreciated work on four dimensional geometric figures.
Unfortunately, the pressure of the family, the media and the environment had to leave a mark on the prodigy child. His psyche finally collapsed. This occurred at the age of 12 and was recorded in the school files. The amount of study, constant competition with other students and paternal ideals, being the subject of scientific research and the constant presence of journalists - all this had a strong impact on his young mind. William managed to recover from the crisis, but he was no longer the same.
By the time William turned 9, his parents decided that he had acquired all the knowledge in elementary and high school, and it was time to send the boy to college. Of course, the choice fell on Boris' home university - Harvard University.
At 16, he graduated from Harvard with an undergraduate degree before taking a position as an assistant math teacher at Rice University in Texas. He returned to the East Coast a short time later to pursue a law degree, but he left it for no apparent reason. He was told to report to the journalists now following his demise that he would rather be a farmer than a mathematical genius.
Years passed, and William moved further and further away from the image of a polite, genius child. He became a socialist and an atheist, and as a result of his participation in the riots that broke out in Boston on the May 1st parade, he was sent to prison for 18 months.
He paid for his views and inappropriate behavior when his parents sent him to a sanatorium in New Hampshire, where he spent a year, and then another to California. He complied because the alternative was to be confined to a psychiatric hospital. However, after these events, in 1921, he finally decided to cut himself off from his parents and start living on his own.
Animated and inanimate
He moved to New York, where he tried to stay aloof by taking up low-paid jobs. He devoted his free time to writing books and articles, which he published under a pseudonym. In his works he focused on both cosmological considerations as well as the anthropology and history of North American Indians. He died in 1944 at the age of 46 of a cerebral hemorrhage. The same cause ended the life of his father, Boris, 21 years earlier.
Although he spent the end of his life almost forgotten, his work was not in vain. In the late 1970s, a researcher and former William's colleague Buckminster Fuller came across a book by Sidis, published in 1925, entitled Animated and Inanimate - The Origin of Life and Entropy . As he later wrote in one of his works:
William was the first to predict the existence of black holes, showing the concept of the universe that appeared in the minds of scientists many years after Sidis himself died. This book is an example of genius and cosmology at the highest level.