Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for educationHollingworth, Leta Stetter
Science
Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for education
Hollingworth, Leta Stetter
Educational psychology; Educational tests and measurements; Exceptional children
For purposes of educational and vocational guidance we now need
especially studies of the relationship between general intelligence and
kinds of drawing other than the representative. We require studies of
the extent to which copying, analytical drawing, symbolic drawing, and
caricature are correlated with general mental capacity. It may be
predicted with some confidence that research in unselected groups will
finally show copying and representative drawing to be slightly
correlated with general intelligence. Analytical and symbolic drawing
are probably significantly correlated with general intelligence, while
caricature is doubtless very closely correlated with intellectual
capacity.
We need also researches bearing upon the relationship between ability in
painting, sculpture, and pattern-cutting, and general intelligence. To
what extent are painters and sculptors of high repute also gifted with
superior intellectual acumen? Popular opinion would have it that the
“artistic mind” is antagonistic in its organization to the “scientific
mind.” Probably here as elsewhere uncontrolled speculation leads to
false conclusions. Probably those who achieve eminence in the arts are,
on the whole, as highly endowed with general intelligence as are those
who win eminence in other kinds of careers. Greatness in graphic
portrayal almost certainly results only when there is a rare combination
of highly specialized capacity for representative drawing, and very high
IQ, in the same individual.
Fortunately for all, modern life calls for all forms of talent in
drawing, in all degrees of combination with general intelligence. Sign
painters, copyists, designers, draughtsmen, architects, illustrators,
and creative interpreters of human faces and of human life are all
needed. Persons skilled in drawing are essential to mechanical and
industrial development in society, for everything made must first be
drawn, from the motor of an airplane to the fancy buttons on a child’s
coat.
V. THE COLOR-BLIND
Between 3 and 5 per cent of boys, and apparently fewer girls, inherit a
special defect of vision, called “color blindness.” A color-blind child
may be gifted in drawing, except in color drawing, but he will be
incompetent as a painter.
There are several forms of this special defect. Very rarely it may
happen that no discrimination among colors is possible, the world
appearing, as in a photograph, to consist only of light and shade. In
the late evening, or in any sufficient dimness, color is not perceived
by ordinary eyes. Those who are blind to all colors do not see color
with the brightening of the light, as ordinarily happens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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