What has excited controversial interest in these youths is not so much their precocity, striking though that is, as the fact that in each case they have been educated along novel lines from their earliest childhood. Their fathers, who have worked independently of one another, assert, indeed, that their unusual mental development is not due to any exceptional talent, but is the result of the peculiar home training they have received; the implication being that a similar development is possible to every normal child if reared in the same way. Besides which, the fathers contend that the prevailing method of giving children little or no formal education until they are old enough to go to school is fundamentally wrong; that the home is the proper place in which to begin a child’s education, and that the proper time to begin is with the first dawning of the child’s ability and desire to use his reasoning powers. Or, as one of them has recently declared: “In the large majority of children the beginning of education should be between the second and third year. It is at that time that the child begins to form his interests. It is at that critical period that we have to seize the opportunity to guide the child’s formative energies in the right channels. To delay is a mistake and a wrong to the child. We can at that early period awaken a love of knowledge which will persist through life. The child will as eagerly play in the game of knowledge as he now spends the most of his energies in meaningless games and objectless, silly sports.” (Boris Sidis’s “Philistine and Genius,” pp. 67-68.) Some few educators in this country have already tentatively approved the new ideas in child-training as exemplified by the methods pursued and the results obtained in the case of these youthful Harvard students. For the most part, however, their promulgation has been greeted skeptically, even with caustic criticism. On the one hand, it is alleged that the parents cannot positively prove that the achievements of their boys are not the result of inherited gifts rather than the special education given them; and, on the other hand, the position is taken that, assuming the correctness of their fathers’ contention in this respect, it is by no means evident that such training is desirable. In the words of one critic, to begin the education of a child at two or three is to rob that child of his childhood. The training in question is described as a “forcing” system, much talk is heard of “mind strain,” and the prediction is freely made that the ultimate outcome can only be to drive children thus educated into an asylum for the insane, or into an early grave.