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Young Einstein: Myth and Reality
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Michael J. A. Howe |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The common image of Albert Einstein as a dullard in youth is far from a truthful portrait of the great scientist, argues Michael J.A. Howe of Exeter University. Contrary to popular belief, Einstein did not metamorphose into a genius upon reaching his twenties. Rather, he can be seen as an unrecognized child prodigy, growing up in the environment of a highly supportive family. |
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| Einstein is today synonymous with genius, as demonstrated by the use of his image in this advertisement. As a child, however, his intelligence was not so highly regarded. | |
 n account of Einstein's early life can provide some helpful insights into possible relationships between being a prodigy in childhood and being an adult genius. Ostensibly, of course, Albert Einstein seems a distinctly odd choice for an example of a child prodigy. Nobody disputes his genius, but the accepted view is that he was far from being a prodigy. He was, we are told, a backward child who was born with an oddly shaped skull, making him a late speaker and a poor student. He is said to have been a troublemaker at his high school (which he left prematurely) and a pupil who gained low grades, failed examinations, and was particularly weak at languages. Unable to get the kind of job he sought on completing his education, Einstein was obliged, we are told, to take a menial post in a patents office. Matters were not helped by his father being a bankrupt. The Einstein family, members of a persecuted Jewish minority, had to leave their home in Germany and take up residence in Italy, where they suffered from being alien immigrants who lacked even the basic security conferred by citizenship. Against this unpromising background, it seems hardly surprising that Einstein's sudden bursting into prominence as a scientist of unique brilliance and originality has been regarded as magical. Here is genius at its most mysterious. He must, it appears, have been born to be a genius. No alternative explanation appears possible. |
Early childhood
None of the above statements about Einstein is totally unfounded. Nonetheless, and contrary to what is widely believed, the young Einstein undoubtedly was a child prodigy, albeit a largely unrecognised one. Numerous observations of the progress he made while still a child illustrate his prodigiousness. From very early days the young Albert Einstein, born in 1879, made a distinctly favourable impression on others. Just a few months after his second birthday his maternal grandmother was writing to a relative that Albert, whom she described as sweet as well as good, was already creating amusing ideas. Her letter is one of a number of items of evidence obtained at the time of Einstein's early childhood that firmly contradict the much repeated claim that his language development was retarded. Another is an anecdote that can be precisely dated to the time when he was aged two years and eight months. This describes him reacting to being told on the occasion of the birth of his baby sister that he now had a new playmate, by asking where were the wheels on this new toy. The child's confusion is unexceptional, but the language development of a two-year-old capable of articulating such a question cannot have been impeded. |
Like many intelligent children, Albert Einstein was sometimes reluctant to talk, and a maidservant once called him stupid because she observed he had a way of repeating everything twice. The most likely real explanation for that behaviour was that he was determined to speak in complete sentences: when asked a question he would work out the answer in his head and try it out for himself, and then repeat the sentence aloud when he had assured himself that he had it right. What he was actually displaying here was not stupidity at all, but the strategic activity of a determined and self-critical child making a deliberate effort to do his best. Already, Einstein was keen to get things correct and unusually willing to persevere at tasks. Even at this age he was often engaged in play activities that involved solving puzzles and problems. He was already demonstrating a painstaking thoroughness, making elaborate structures from building blocks and, later, houses constructed from cards. |
The adult Einstein's earliest memory of experiencing profound curiosity about a scientific mystery related to an occasion at the age of four or five when his father first showed him a magnetic compass. This, Einstein later recalled, made a lasting impression. He remembered his sense of wonder at observing the needle behaving in a manner that simply did not make sense in terms of his conceptual understanding of the world. He knew that there had to be some cause, but it was frustratingly hidden from him. |
School days
In early childhood he was unenthusiastic about playing with other children and was inclined to tantrums, but these disappeared at around the time Einstein started school. In his first years there he seemed to be a reserved and isolated child, and yet it was apparent that he was bright and capable. At the end of his first year of school (in August 1886) his mother was writing to her sister that Albert had brought home a brilliant report. She noted that he was at the top of his class, and not for the first time. Out of school he was equally impressive, his preferred spare time activities being mentally stimulating ones such as making fretwork articles, working with a metal construction set, and playing with a small model steam engine which a relative had given him. |
There is a persisting although wildly inaccurate claim that Einstein was a bad pupil who failed to flourish at the Munich high school, or Gymnasium, which he attended from the age of nine and a half. In fact this assertion was firmly refuted as early as 1929, at which time the school's then principal searched the old records and was able to confirm that all the evidence demonstrated that Einstein had actually been a very good student. There had been no complaints about him and, no marks that were other than good. The written evidence of Einstein's performance also proved that the newspaper reports, in which Einstein was said to have been an especially poor student of languages, were totally unfounded. |
Einstein did well at school despite the fact that neither the ambience nor the curriculum was particularly suitable for a Jewish child of his temperament and interests. There were eight hours of Latin every week and four of Greek from the fourth year onwards. This left little time for other subjects, and so there were only three mathematics classes per week, and only two science and geography classes. Physics was not taught at all until the seventh year. Fortunately for Einstein, he had made considerable progress in those subjects by private study in his spare time, reaching levels of attainment well beyond the school's requirements. |
Encountering genius
By the age of eleven or so Albert Einstein was reading about science and philosophy in books that were beyond the understanding of most children. He was already contemplating the conflicting claims of science and religion, and had become convinced that much that he had read in the Bible could not be true. At the same age he became enchanted by mathematics. On encountering Pythagoras' theorem he determined to prove it. He succeeded, but only after three weeks of the kind of strenuous and unremitting contemplation that (although Einstein would not have known it at the time) was a characteristic mental activity of his great predecessor Isaac Newton. In common with Newton and a number of other outstanding thinkers (including Galileo and Bertrand Russell) Einstein became particularly strongly attracted to the certainty and purity of Euclid's geometry. Before the age of twelve he had quickly worked his way through a geometry textbook and made a serious start on the study of advanced mathematics. Such was his progress that the family friend who had first encouraged his interest was soon finding it impossible to keep up with the child. |
Science and mathematics were not the only difficult subjects Einstein began to master in his childhood. At the age of thirteen he studied--and appears to have enjoyed and comprehended--Kant's notoriously daunting Critique of Pure Reason. A classmate from this period later recalled how impressive a conversationalist the boy had already become. His main interests were intellectual ones, although he could be a mischievous practical joker at school. He was also acquiring a love of music. His mother, a capable pianist, had arranged for him to have lessons from the age of six. For years the child made very little progress, but at thirteen he suddenly acquired a passion for Mozart's sonatas, and leaped ahead, discovering that 'love is a better teacher than a sense of duty--at least for me' (quoted in A. Fösling, Albert Einstein, trans. E. Osers, 1997, p. 26). His much-admired expertise at playing the violin gave him enjoyment throughout his life. |
Clearly, the young Albert Einstein was indeed a child prodigy. His accomplishments by the age of twelve were already far beyond the average, especially in science and mathematics. Yet as is true of other geniuses, there are no indications that Einstein was born unusually clever or that he learned more easily than other people: the qualities that did set him apart from other children seem to have been rooted more in his personality and temperament and his mental habits than in innate intelligence. As Einstein remarked on a number of occasions, he was passionately curious from an early age, and intrigued to discover how things work. Like virtually all great scientists he was immensely determined and dogged: he was always prepared to continue concentrating for very long periods on any challenge that gained his attention. At an early age he gained a capacity for unceasing reflection and contemplation. He insisted that he had not been born with any special gift. |
Family influences
The knowledge that Einstein was in fact an extraordinarily precocious child makes it clear that the monumental achievements of his mid-twenties were far from being the first and unanticipated signs that a new scientific genius was alive. However, although it is important to establish that Einstein was already intellectually remarkable when he was a child, doing that does not account for his prodigious powers. Knowing that he was a prodigy rather than the backward child he is often supposed to have been resolves some apparent mysteries, but leaves other questions unanswered. How and why did he become a prodigy in the first place? The unpromising early family circumstances give no real clues here. They offer no reasons for anticipating that this particular child's early progress would be at all superior to the average. |
Yet, as in the case of a number of other early lives, brief accounts of the outward circumstances of a young person's life can be inaccurate and even misleading indicators of the true state of affairs. That is undoubtedly true of Einstein. The actual experiences of Einstein's early years were enormously more advantageous than a cursory glance would suggest. Once we are able to gain a reasonably full picture of the actual everyday world the young Einstein inhabited, it is evident that his real circumstances were not remotely unfavourable. In reality, the events and the influences that made up Albert Einstein's early years were almost ideal ones for nurturing the development of an enthusiastic young future scientist. |
Right from the beginning, the young Albert Einstein was given plenty of encouragement and intellectual stimulation. He came from a large and generally prosperous family, in which a number of relatives could be counted upon to provide help on those occasions when Einstein's own parents experienced difficulties. At one time an aunt in Italy helped to finance Albert's studies, and Einstein's maternal grandparents were comfortably placed for giving assistance when it was needed. It is true that Albert Einstein's father got into difficulties at times, but for substantial periods he flourished and prospered. |
At the time of Albert's birth, his parents lived in a comfortable apartment in the city of Ulm, in southern Germany. They moved to Munich a year later. It was a good marriage, and the child's home background was harmonious as well as being unusually supportive. Einstein's mother and father were educated people who took their parental responsibilities seriously, making sure, for instance, that their eldest child always finished his school homework. Both of them respected their Jewish origins but took little notice of Jewish religion or ritual. They did not attend a synagogue, and no specifically Jewish rites or customs were followed at home, and nor were Jewish cooking rituals obeyed. Their reading, in which the works of authors such as Schiller and Heine were prominent, mirrored that of other cultured Germans of the time. |
Conclusion
In short, Einstein's early family background was one that provided large measures of mental stimulation for the growing child, and also gave him the support and structure that would have enabled a child to flourish. So both of those attributes of a home background that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's investigations have shown to be especially crucial for promoting mental expertise and competence were present in abundance in the Einstein home. For a growing scientist, his was an exceptionally privileged childhood. The advantages he was given could never have guaranteed that his progress would be exceptional, let alone as prodigious as it turned out to be, but they undoubtedly did contribute to his intellectual development. |
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